brad's Full Review: Kensington DomeHub 33118 7-Port
For starters, Epinions has the wrong brand attached to this device, which is actually branded by and manufactured by Kensington. You can see the "Kensington" brand printed on the image of the device on Epinions' product page.
With that out of the way, this is the best USB hub I've ever used and I've owned a dozen or so of these in my life. I've never had a portable one - and this one isn't - so I don't know anything about that niche. But among desktop USB hubs, this is easily the best one I've used, for a number of reasons.
First of all, one of the big problems with USB hubs is that most of them are "bus-powered." That is, you just plug them into your computer and the hub draws power from the computer. That's fine for convenience, but it erodes performance. This hub is self-powered with its own AC adapter and I looked for this when I shopped. For lots of peripherals, a bus-powered USB hub is fine. But when you start attaching things like scanners or certain external drives, you need more power.
Speaking of performance, many USB hubs will knock down that typical bandwidth transfer, and this one does as well, but not nearly as much. I previously had a Belkin self-powered USB hub and it quite noticably reduced the USB 2.0 bandwidth. This Kensington works like a champ in this area, coming close to maintaining typical USB 2.0 transfer speeds. That's important.
Those were the two most important features I was looking for. The rest was gravy. As it turns out, the gravy overflows on this one, so to speak.
It has a good track record of performance. This should go without saying if I did my research, which I did, but I found out after the fact the the previous hub I had - the Belkin - has a history of causing some serious problems with attached computers. This Kensington model is fairly old - three or so years - but it's still technologically relevant and has a good track record, if you seek out other reviews at places like Amazon.
I love the exterior engineering. The dome shape is very cool and looks so much better than some hunk of plastic sitting on top of my desktop like so many other hubs. The dome is also weighted so that all those cables I have attached to it doesn't pull it out of position. It neatly sits adjacent to my iMac and keeps its place.
The one drawback to this hub is attaching USB devices. That sounds bad, but it's not all that bad. It's just a tiny bit tricky to get those plugs into their slots on the rear of the hub. But since it's a dome shape, the slots are easily accessible. Still, the slots are angled in a way that makes it somewhat difficult to attach. However, once attached, I have never had a connection problem. There is one slot on the top of the dome, apparently for flash drives or an iPod or something you would frequently plug and play. That's nice.
It would seem that USB hubs are simple devices. And for the most part, they are. In the old days, all USB hubs were self-powered. Now, few are. If it's a portable hub with a portable device and I'm only using card readers or flash drives, then that is fine. But for heavy duty peripherals like scanners, optical drives, hard drives and the like, I need power.
It's also nice to have an aesthetically functional hub. This is a very cool hub in terms of design. I love it. It works great, it looks great on my desk, and it's not dangerous. Again, you'd think any USB hub would get the job done, but I've had enough of them to conclude that it's still necessary to do one's homework. Thanks to Kensington for helping me out.
I highly recommend the Kensington (K)33118 USB 7-port hub.
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