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Toshiba Dynadock Wireless U

21.10.2009
We may be living in the age of Wi-Fi and Bluetooth, but much of the laptop experience is still heavily wired. Me? I'm tired of being chained to a desk by my speakers, external display, and assorted USB devices. Luckily, Toshiba's Dynadock Wireless U ($300 from Toshiba, $250 from Amazon.com; ) wireless docking station showed up at the office. I took a couple days to play with it, and here are my initial impressions.

The Dynadock Wireless U packs a DVI connector (with VGA adapter), six USB ports, a digital audio port, and an Ethernet port, as well as line-in, headphone, and microphone jacks. Anything you plug in will be usable by your laptop, which it connects to via an included USB stick. You could leave your cameras, phones, speakers, and so on connected to the dock while you roam around the room on the laptop with full access to your devices, or you could work from the hub by connecting a full keyboard and mouse to the USB ports and hooking up an external display while your laptop sits elsewhere.

I tried it out with a couple different laptops (a top-flight laptop running Vista and an aging ThinkPad with 1GB of memory and a 1.8-GHz Pentium M with Windows XP) and got mixed results.

The installation process was a pain--it involved several restarts and the occasional plug-and-unplug troubleshooting. It would have been nice if the Dynadock Wireless U had one central application that governed everything. Once the Dynadock was properly synced to a PC, however, it was no trouble at all to plug in Ethernet cables, USB devices, audio gear, or monitors and start using them.