Google OnHub Review: A $200 Bet On The Future
Google has been branching out into new areas of hardware in recent years. It bought Nest and Dropcam, and now the Google Store acts as a storefront for Google to push its own hardware, as well as products made by others. The OnHub was an unexpected twist for Google's hardware aspirations, though. It does make some sense when you think about it. Routers are usually ugly and annoying to use, but is the $200 OnHub the best way to fix that?
Google's OnHub is a router built in partnership with TP-Link. It's a small cylinder about 7.5-inches tall. The smooth shape is actually just a shell that fits over top of the core router, which is still a nice looking piece of hardware with adapter such as Asus EEE PC 1015 AC Adapter, Asus Eee PC 1015N AC Adapter, Asus Eee PC 1015T AC Adapter, Asus Eee PC 1016 AC Adapter, Asus Eee PC 1018 AC Adapter, Asus Eee PC 1018P AC Adapter, Asus Eee PC 1101HA AC Adapter, Asus EEE PC 1215 AC Adapter, Asus Eee PC 1201HA AC Adapter, Asus Pro23 X23 AC Adapter, Asus G73 AC Adapter, Asus G53 AC Adapter. There are no external antennas on this device. Instead it has an array of 13 antennas built-in. There are six for 2.4GHz, six for 5GHz, and one that monitors the wireless environment and switches channels as needed to minimize interference.
On the back of the OnHub are the ports, of which you only get a few. There's an WAN port, a single gigabit ethernet network port, power, and a USB 3.0 (more on that later). The indicator lights from most routers have been replaced by a single glowing ring on top of the OnHub. The color of this ring tells you what's going on, but it's mostly going to be light blue. That means everything is cool.
We don't usually review routers on Android Police, but this one happens to be intimately linked with your mobile device, and it is Google. I don't consider myself a particularly advanced user of networking equipment, but I'm more demanding than the average man on the street. I'm not going to try and quantify all aspects of the OnHub and compare it to other routers—there are websites that already do that sort of thing quite well. I want to talk about what it's like to use the OnHub with a ton of mobile devices and how it integrates with them.
As soon as you plug in the OnHub, the experience is vastly different than other routers. Instead of bumbling around in a god-awful web interface to get things set up, you download the Google On app. This is a nifty way to interact with your router, and the design is slick. The phone and router pair with an audio tone produced through the router's speaker (that's all it seems to do right now).
The entire setup process takes barely five minutes. After the phone pairs with the router you choose a network name and password. That's pretty much it. The OnHub verifies your internet connectivity and you can begin logging into your new network with other devices.
I think the setup process is the smoothest of any router you can buy. I'd be confident in my parents getting the OnHub up and running without any phone calls to me. Whatever else the OnHub does or doesn't do, that's an impressive feat.