NETGEAR CEO Patrick Lo unveiled a slew of new products for the connected home Wednesday morning, introducing the company’s shifted focus from computers to entertainment and mobile devices.
“2011 is a tipping point where the number of connected devices in the home will surpass the number of PCs,” Lo said. “The entertainment demands of modern home networks require much higher levels of connectivity – non-stop, high-speed, and high-definition.”
To that end, NETGEAR is launching five new wireless routers. The N600 Wireless Dual Band Gigabit Router, Premium Edition ($179.99, available in 2Q 2011), is the flagship product, billed as the highest-performance wireless router on the market. The all-in-one N600 Wireless Dual Band Gigabit ADSL Modem Router offers the same features but includes a modem or Ethernet port to support multiple broadband technologies within a single gateway.
Another showstopper was the 3DHD Wireless Home Theater Networking Kit ($259), capable of streaming “jitter-free” HD video to four different devices. They claim the signal is strong enough to completely cover a 6,000-square-foot home and pass through up to 10 walls. We saw a demo at CES Unveiled last night, and the quality was excellent. It features the Quantenna Wi-Fi chipset, which may be a key component in many devices in the coming year.
NETGEAR also unveiled a 4G Mobile broadband wireless router for Verizon’s new 4G network: A good fit for construction sites, RVs, other locations where wired connections just don’t work. Their NEOTV HD Media Player ($199) also looked very cool: Able to search all content on a home network and categorize it into a single library accessible by all devices on the network. Their ReadyNAS Ultra 2 home media storage devices enable TiVo users to shift their DVR content to the NAS, to free up memory on the TiVo unit. Many of the new NETGEAR products allow users to access content on their home network remotely via mobile devices using Orb technology.
In keeping with their philosophy that customers want the fastest routers AND the easiest experience in the home, NETGEAR also unveiled the NETGEAR Genie, a free home network dashboard application usable with most of the new products. The Genie looks easy to use and offered many tools to maximize a home network, including automatic diagnosis and correction of network issues, parental controls, guest logins, broadband usage meter, and a map of connected devices.