Review: Looks good, works better

The category of networking products hasn't been known for their aesthetics, mostly because it hasn't been necessary. Many brands, however, have now been placing increasing emphasis on form too instead of just function.

The Cisco E4200 is a fine example; with its minimalistic design featuring a grey black matte finish and silver strip running down the middle of the router. The Cisco logo on the strip glows in line with network activity but all other activity LEDs are on the back of the router.

The leader of the E Series Pack as of now, the E4200 has a higher speed than the E3000 we reviewed some time ago. It goes up to 300+450Mbps, which should help with the streaming issues the previous router had.

The router configuration utility — Cisco Connect — has had a few improvements too and now allows you to use a USB disk to configure your machines to connect to the router thereby taking a lot of the hassle. However, dependence on this may leave you unaware of the setup details which may be an issue when you're using a device that doesn't support USB — like the iPad or your phone. If you don't care much for Cisco Connect and like to get your hands dirty, you can always use the web interface to make changes to the router setup.

Just like its predecessors, the E4200 also features the USB port which you can plug a hard drive or flash drive to in order to make it Network Attached Storage (NAS) — a drive that can be shared by all users across the network. Besides, the USB port now allows a printer to be connected which can also be shared on the network.

The increase in speed is a welcome improvement and alleviates some of the streaming issues that existed in earlier versions of the router.

The E4200 is a great router that — with is USB support — enables a truly networked environment. Its improvement to the web interface and minimalist design show Cisco's intentions of making networking equipment a little less dull. Even though the price is a little on the higher side — at north of Dh600 — the E4200 makes for a good purchase.

Bhavishya Kanjhan is a digital marketing professional and an early adopter of all things digital. Follow his tweets on @bhavishya