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The device is designed to enable a standard USB printer to be accessed over a wireless network. The device grabs itself an IP address and as such can be addressed by any operating system with IP printing functionality - that's Windows XP and Mac OSX for most of you. You can plug a printer (or two) in to either (or both) of the USB ports on the back of the device and then print to it wirelessly. Simple concept, huh?

The rear of the device is rather as you'd expect. There's the wireless antenna, the power jack, and the two USB ports for printer connections. There's also an Ethernet jack for connecting to a standard, wired router rather than over wireless, making this suitable for networking any printer to any network.

Well, we say any printer, but you'll need to make sure that your printer is on Belkin's compatibility list. There are reports that some printers that aren't on the list might work, but Belkin doesn't guarantee it.

What other technical considerations are there? Well, perhaps the most obvious (or not so obvious, depending on how security conscious you are) is that you will need to make sure that the Belkin supports the type of wireless encryption you may or may not be using. The device supports WEP encryption of all varieties, but not WPA, as far as we could tell. You may also need to look up the MAC address of the device if you have MAC filtering switched on throughout your network.

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