Apple Airport ExpressApple introduced the Airport Express today, surprising observers who expected product announcements to be on hold until the WWDC conference in San Francisco later this month. Apple-watching is a surprise-fraught art not unlike Kremlinology used to be, with the added risk of cease-and-desist letters by the notoriously secretive and litigious company.

The Airport Express is a compact little wireless network in a box, offering an IEEE 802.11g WiFi access point cum router, an Ethernet port, an audio port to stream audio (interestingly, it supports both conventional electrical line-level output as well as Toslink optical in the same jack), and a USB port to allow printer sharing (no word on whether this also allows scanner sharing the way Keyspan’s USB server does).

This unit replaces 2 or 3 boxes (and their associated wall warts), is relatively inexpensive at $129, and will no doubt become as popular and widely (yet poorly) imitated as the iPod was in its day, specially given it can be used by Windows PCs. If I did not already have a Slimdevices Squeezebox (with beta support for the Apple lossless encoder), I might have be tempted, in spite of the lack of a display or remote control.

I am not all that fond of the wall-wart concept, but the plug can be removed and replaced with a standard IEC-320-C7 cable (which can certainly be found far cheaper than the ridiculously expensive $39 Apple charges for them), or even powered from Ethernet using the new power-over-Ethernet standard 802.3af (the USB port is disabled in that case), a nice touch that exemplifies Apple’s attention to detail. As a side note for those of you who have a hard time coping with wall warts, I highly recommend the Power Strip Liberator Plus, a simple but highly effective solution to the problem of clogged power strips.

That said, there is one port missing, one that would have turned the Airport Express from a well-designed piece of electronics into a visionary product: a phone jack. A RJ-11 jack that can be plugged into a phone line (FXO) or into which a phone can be plugged (FXS) would bridge one of the few remaining domains not covered by Apple’s digital hub (the other one being TV). With iTunes AV, Apple has a very capable Voice over IP (VoIP) client, but no way to interface it to legacy POTS (Plain Old Telephone System) networks. I am not sure if this is deliberate and if they want to introduce this as a value-added feature to their .Mac Internet services suite, but Apple has lacked decent telephony product since the introduction of the Geoport ten years ago.

It should be straightforward to add telephony software to a Mac and have it able to act as an intelligent voice-mail or IVR system (forwarding voice mails via email the way Panther’s Fax feature can with faxes). Computer-Telephony Integration, widespread in the PC world, is also an essential feature for many enterprise applications (think call centers or CRM). Many small businesses use Macs because they cannot afford full-time IT staff to baby-sit Windows machines. Offering them an integrated telephony solution would be a very attractive proposition.