Polar Route 3: "Big" Transformation from 5V to 12V | Ainongji - 上海419贵族宝贝-上海后花园1314-上海品茶网-阿拉爱上海

Update on March 24, 2015: Formatting the SD card with the Sohu remote download plug-in using Polar Route will generate hidden partitions. See the Sohu remote download plug-in section for details.

In the early days, Polar Route used "scientific Internet access" as its biggest selling point. This gimmick was indeed effective, allowing Polar Route to quickly accumulate a large number of potential users. However, regardless of the marketing strategy adopted by Polar Route, the fact that Polar Route was an early pioneer in the intelligent routing market cannot be changed. I also knew Polar Route at that time.

Today's intelligent routing market is much more competitive than the competition in the previous two years. Whether Xiaomi and 360, which have a huge user base, or Lenovo, which cooperates with Baidu to launch newifi, are trying to open up the small market of intelligent routing. After the release of "Polar Route 2" at the end of 2013, Polar Route 3 was low-key released on WeChat group on the evening of March 17 after more than a year. The next day, it officially accepted reservations in JD at a price of 299 yuan.

What are the changes of polar route 3

Polar Route 3 uses the common white hard shell paper packaging. Compared with the packaging miniaturization and environmental protection advocated in recent years, Polar Route 3's packaging appears to be much larger. It seems that there is a MacBook Air in it. There are some simple parameters and the QR code of WeChat official account on the back. Adding it after scanning can provide certain customer service functions.

Polar Route 3 is much larger than the previous generation's Polar Route 2 in terms of visual perception, and there are obvious differences in design styles. Polar Route 2 is obviously more square, like a box, while Polar Route 3 uses a streamlined design. The color matching of the upper pole route 3 adopts the more eye-catching "local gold", which is also quite different from the steady black of the upper pole route 2. The fuselage inherits the consistent metal material of the polar route.

The SD card slot of the previous generation of Polar Route 2 has been changed to a more popular and compact Micro SD card slot on Polar Route 3, and the USB interface has been retained. The number of one WAN port and two LAN ports has not changed. I think it is enough for single men. The blue status indicator lights up when the front panel is powered on, but it still seems unclear if there are only icons without text descriptions.

Compared with Polar Route 2, Polar Route 3 has one more antenna. The angle of the three antennas can be turned freely. Basically, you can play with them at will. The two-stage design can stop completely at 45 degrees. Similarly, these three antennas can be completely flat. But today's antennas are omnidirectional, and only vertical placement can get better signals. So unless you want to hang it on the wall, you don't need to lay it flat. For ordinary families, it is suggested that the router be placed in the corner of the wall to get better results.

Polar Route 3 is still a 2.4/5GHz dual band, but the maximum transmission rate has been increased to 1167Mbps (300Mbps+867Mbps), while Polar Route 2 is only 733Mbps (300Mbps+433Mbps). Although the rate of 5Ghz band has been increased, there is still room for improvement in 2.4Ghz band. After all, there are 450Mbps devices in the market at 2.4GHz band. Moreover, the compatibility of the 5GHz band is not perfect. Not only did mobile devices and most smart home accessories before 2011 not support the 5GHz band, but Apple supported the full range of MacBooks in 2013, and laptops supporting the 5GHz band did not become mainstream throughout 2014. Fortunately, this situation has finally changed in early 2015, But if you only use the 5GHz band at home, wait for all kinds of problems.

Many people don't know where the so-called gigabit routing is now. In fact, in terms of wireless transmission rate, the mainstream of 2.4GHz is 300Mbps, The mainstream of the 5GHz band is 867Mbps (of course, there are high-end models such as NETGEAR R8000, which can reach 600Mbps at 2.4GHz, and 2.6Gbps at 5GHz), while the gigabit is generally said that the WAN port and at least two LAN ports of the router support 1000Mbps.

In general, Polar Route 3, which supports access to 64 devices, can meet the access requirements of all devices in an ordinary home. However, in an office environment, it is much more complex, and its stability needs to be improved.

The power adapter uses the traditional DC interface and 12V and 1.5A power supply, while in the previous two generations of pole routing, Micro USB interface is used for power supply. The lack of power supply for Micro USB interface has led to the instability of mobile hard disk connection, which has become the object of criticism by users. Finally, the traditional power interface has been replaced in pole routing 3. Of course, the function of connecting the computer or mobile power supply will not be available.

About USB interface

As for the USB interface of Polar Route 2, I don't think I need to complain about it. The official forum of Polar Route has been flooded by the drool on the network. Of course, the reason is that the previous two generations of Polar Route adopt Micro USB interface for power supply. Its voltage and current can basically meet the needs of the router itself, but it is not enough for mobile hard disks that need more current to drive. Fortunately, Polar Route 3 lost its way and switched back to the traditional DC power interface. The power supply voltage and current reached 12V and 1.5A, which was enough to easily drive the mobile hard disk. However, I still have some questions about this. We need to know that the Micro USB interface can actually achieve high voltage and high current. In the mobile phone industry, Qualcomm and OPPO both provide power supplies with high voltage and high current. The pole route cutting off this function is more from the cost perspective.

The use of external mobile hard disk and USB flash drive needs to cooperate with the cloud plug-in of the LAN file transfer station. Setting the user name and password can protect your file content more securely. Open hiwifi. com through the address bar of the File Explorer, you can see the folders named by the USB flash drive characters (the folders you named just now are SD cards). Drag files into these folders to share with the LAN. I tested that the USB flash drive does not have a minimum 4GB limit, and that the FAT and exFAT formats are well supported. After that, I copied a 150MB file in about 20 seconds. The speed is about 7MB/S. Usually, the USB2.0 USB flash drive has a write speed of 3-10MB. After testing, a Seagate 1TB mobile hard disk can also provide good support. A 1.04G file dragged back is stable without interruption. As a LAN transit station, it is qualified (all files are tested in the 5GHz band environment).

The web background is not friendly enough

Polar router adopts HiWifi OS system, which is deeply optimized and improved based on Linux+OpenWRT development. In addition, it has officially developed iOS and Android versions of mobile clients.

After entering the background management through hiwifi.com, the home page's graphical interface looks good, but it actually feels a bit messy: on the left are routing storage, system status, advanced settings and mobile phone control. The other three main functions are Internet connection, wireless settings and cloud plug-ins, which are distributed at the bottom left, right and top.

In the center, it will show how many devices are connecting to the router. Click to have details. It can display the MAC address, IP address, device name and other information of the current wireless network device. After the device is named, it will be automatically identified when it is connected for the second time, so that it is clear which devices are connected to the pole route at a glance.

The background of Polar Route provides the function of limiting the speed of the device. People who like to download large files without limit can limit the speed. This function is very useful especially when several people are sharing a lease. Later, I downloaded a game to test. At the beginning, the speed was about 800K/S, and the speed limit was 50K/S when starting. The download speed immediately dropped below 50K/S, which can confirm that the speed limit function of Polar Route 3 is fast and effective. In addition, it also provides the function of forced disconnection, so that it is no longer afraid of strange devices scratching the network.

There are not many cloud plug-ins that are really easy to use

Plug ins are the selling point function in the era of intelligent routing, so I decided to try out whether the plug-ins of Polar Routing are really so useful, and whether they can let me use them comfortably and happily. Some cloud plug-in functions can only be installed after inserting a microSD card. In terms of capacity, the polar router supports 32GB memory cards at most, and does not support memory cards below 4GB. Of course, if you connect a mobile hard disk, there is no problem in terms of storage capacity. The remaining problem is whether it is convenient to download.

Before use, bind the Xunlei account according to the plug-in function wizard.

With plug-ins from third-party developers, Jirou can realize Xunlei remote download, install Xunlei remote download and Internet transfer, and bind Xunlei account according to prompts. The QR code given in the plug-in is Xunlei TV assistant, but when using it, it will first search the surrounding TV boxes, but what you need to do is to bind your own remote download router to the download page. You can directly input links or select from offline space to add tasks. Since the offline space of Xunlei now requires member functions, it is not convenient to input download links on mobile phones, so Xunlei remote download function is not very practical.

I have also tried other Xunlei clients, including mobile Xunlei and Xunlei Watch, but the resources on them are a collection of several video websites. I can't download TV dramas, movie waypoints, variety shows and MTV, let alone remote cache to the router, so I have to give up this function.

Sohu video plug-in is one of the more convenient plug-ins. After downloading and installing, open the mobile phone's Sohu video client. There is a search router function in the settings. As long as the mobile phone is connected to the extremely routed wireless network, it can be bound. Later, when caching, you can choose to cache it in the remote route in addition to the local one.

In the actual test, it is found that this function is still practical. After binding, video can also be remotely cached in the router under the mobile network. What good content you see outside in the daytime can be remotely cached, and then you can go back to play the cache in the router at night. But the problem is that the copyrighted videos in Sohu videos cannot be cached, which means that American TV series and Riman videos cannot use this function.

Supplement: When I used my Micro SD card for a period of time and inserted it back into my computer, I found that the capacity of the 32G Micro SD card I just bought had changed to 1G. After asking the official staff, I found the problem. After using the format SD card function of Sohu remote download plug-in, a hidden partition in ext format will be generated, which cannot be read and recognized under Windows, If you want to restore, you need to partition the SD card again.

Mobile terminal management routing is simpler

In terms of mobile client, Extreme Routing supports iOS and Android mobile operating systems. I use the iOS client, but the main page of this client is still a bit baffling. There is no useful information displayed in a large area. In the case of a single device, there are only two icons, Internet and Extreme Routing. You can access the details function by clicking.

The client provides the same basic functions as the web side, but the client should be more fool like in use, which is divided into five items: WiFi timing switch, one button acceleration, one button physical examination, one button speed measurement and WiFi channel. But I didn't feel anything after I tried the acceleration function, but I can try this function when I encounter unstable network conditions

When testing the one click physical examination function, it found that it would detect the risk level from the router firmware version, 2.4G/5G WiFi password and router background password. If the default background login password was not modified, it would be judged as unsafe. It is a good reminder for Chinese who do not like to change the default login password.

The inefficient WeChat official account

In addition to the web side and mobile phone client, Jiluyou's WeChat official account (WeChat: jiluyou or HiWiFi) can also provide customer service.

In the actual test, we found that WeChat customer service can bring little help. Clicking WeChat customer service function is only displayed in the queue. WeChat customer service working hours display 10:19:00, but the message sent at 11:10 finally got a reply 15 minutes later. It is obvious that WeChat customer service is not suitable for solving problems. Such communication efficiency is too low.

In addition, the WeChat reminder function did not work, and there was no push reminder service after the mobile phone was disconnected and reconnected every other moment. But when I was connected all the time, I received the online reminder inexplicably. But in the evening, I received the online reminder just after I connected, so this function is not stable now, and sometimes I need to compete for personality.

There are 4 levels of signal strength

There are 4 levels of signal strength in the polar route, and I chose 3 levels. According to the official description, it is the degree that "through the load-bearing wall, the bathroom can also search the Internet". According to the actual test, the 2.4GHz and 5GHz signals of the polar route do not show much difference after passing through a wall and an arc corridor, but only reduce one grid from the full grid signal. Compared with the WiFi analyzer app and the previous generation of Ji'er Station, we can find that the signal of Ji'er Route 3 is really stronger. (The polar route 3 test is - 32dBm, and the polar route 2 test is - 52dBm. The higher the value, the better) We may conduct more in-depth tests on signals in the later stage.

If you are going to place the router next to the computer, it is recommended to set the signal to Level 1 or Level 2, which is enough for one bedroom and two bedroom use. Of course, if your home is large enough and you are still not satisfied with Level 3 signal, you can choose Level 4 signal, which is officially claimed to be able to achieve "villa level coverage". But if you already live in a villa, you probably won't use polar routing, will you?

Summary

Compared with the previous generation products, the Polar Route 3 has larger volume, more antennas and a more streamlined appearance. From the performance point of view, the wireless speed of the new product is only increased in the 5G band. The more commonly used 2.4G band is still 300Mbps, and the speed is only up to the current level of 100 yuan intelligent routing. As a route priced at 299 yuan, it is not cost-effective in this respect alone. Fortunately, the signal part has improved significantly, and users who want to go through the wall should not be disappointed.

As more third-party developers join, more and more new ways of playing based on router plug-ins will become available. The next development of intelligent routing still has much room for imagination. Unfortunately, the current intelligent routing in the whole market has not been fully recognized by consumers because of the "smart" part, which has not generated a premium, and ultimately has to compete with traditional routing in terms of price and signal.

The upgrade of Polar Router 3 is well planned. We don't find the future development direction of Polar Router from it. Instead, we have a feeling of returning to the duty of routers - good intelligent routers should be good routers first. This is helplessness and reality.