Review: Viewsonic WMG120 Wireless Media Gateway

In my previous review, I looked at the Viewsonic WMA100, which is a multimedia adapter designed to display digital media content on your TV and home audio system. But sometimes it's not convenient to tie up your computer just to watch a movie or listen to music and it turns out that Viewsonic has a solution to that problem too.

In this review, I'll take a look at Viewsonic's server companion device to the WMA120. The Viewsonic WMG120 combines an 802.11g wireless router with a built-in 120 GB file server. Its primary purpose is to serve content to the WMA100 without tying up your PC, but it can also act as a full wireless router, complete with print server.

The WMG120 is styled much like the WMA100, i.e. a squarish gray box that at first glance looks like a typical home router / access point. But on closer examination, the height of the box tells you it's a bit different than what you'd normally find. The extra height of the device is designed to hold an internal hard drive, and a look at the back of the device (Figure 1) shows you another difference - two USB ports used for a connecting a printer or for serving up content from a flash drive.

Figure 1: The back of the WMG120

Figure 2 is a shot of the WMG120's innards. That's the same Conexant PRISM-based 11g radio board used in the WMA100, but the design uses an Intel IXP420 Network Processor instead of the Sigma Design EM8551 Media Processor.

Figure 2: Inside the WMG120
(click image to enlarge)