I travel quite a bit with my laptop and am always on the lookout for open access points to check my mail. It's a bit of a pain to dig out my PowerBook only to find out there's nothing in range.
I've been interested in the Planex GW-US54GD WiFi Dongle / Detector / Access Point for a while, but it used to cost around ¥8000 or around USD$75 which was a bit rich for such a gadget. I found it recently on sale for ¥2980 ($25) at a store in Kyoto, so I picked one up. The Japanese name of the product is 電波男 (Dempa Otoko or Wave Man -- a pun on the otaku film/novel 電車男 (Densha Otoko or Train Man).
The GW-US54GD has stronger reception than the built-in WiFi on my aluminum PowerBook G4. This isn't surprising as my PBG4 consistently gets worse reception than any other computer / WiFi device I have -- including my partner's iBook. I'm able to pull in weaker signals with the GW-US54GD and the speed -- over USB 2.0 -- seems to be the same as with the built-in WiFi.
Although the Japanese web pages don't have Macintosh and Linux drivers, the English pages do -- even though the Planex GW-US54GD is only sold in Japan as far as I can tell! The English drivers for MacOSX work fine -- they install a new LAN port as en3 and redirect traffic there. I hope the driver continues to work under MacOSX 10.5.
More info: http://www.planex.net/download/wireless/gw-us54gd.htm
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