Western Digital is not new to consumer electronics, they have been making excellent quality products for more than a decade and I have purchased many of their Storage and Home entertainment products before and always pleased with the quality and performance.They are however new to the consumer electronics networking area with their My Net Series of Routers and Storage routers. N900 Dual Band router is just one notch below their Western Digital My Net N900 Central 1 TB HD Dual-Band Storage Router which is their top of the line product which boasts an `all-in-one' storage networking solution for home.Here is my review of this product. You can read the relevant sections and skip others which you do not care.(Please bear with me as this is going to be a long review)Hardware Build Quality: (4½ of 5)-------------------------------------------As stated before, WD does make nice quality Hardware products. My Net N900 Dual-Band Router is no exception as it surely is a high end consumer router by any spec. The nice textured curvy concave design is a welcome change in the usually boring lab centric looking black or white boxes with bright color Blue LEDs we see from other manufacturers.While this design does take up some amount of precious desk space due to the `surprising' horizontal design it does allow users to mount it on the wall with some screws for saving desk space. I am sure WD had a reason for this horizontal design. I think it's got to do with the array of amplified antennas inside the router. Placement of these sensitive plane sensitive antennas perhaps forced WD to have a horizontal design?Also, Thanks to some clever thinking team at WD they have finally got the bright Blue LED's brightness right to exactly what one needs and nothing more. No glaring blue LEDs flashing needlessly at you! It is just bright enough to give that indication at glance and fully functional.Design, Cooling & Noise: (4½ of 5)-------------------------------------------Routers are always ON devices in your home. While they consume very little power in terms of watts but they do get `warm' to `hot' depending on the ambient temperature inside the house.The N900's clever cooling design which has small fins in the edge contour of the box and included automatic temperature controlled cooling fan making this product to be installed in somewhat hostile (Mostly ignored) conditions and still perform as intended. Most of the consumer electronics routers I have seen in the past get warm to near burning hot as the chips inside do generate a lot of heat. Passive cooling or mounting heat-sinks on them can only cool electronics to a degree but nothing can replace a cooling fan for circulating cold air inside the box.I have never experienced a situation yet with this router wherein the FAN came ON and made noises. Which means for most people this router will be near silent operation under normal working conditions.Graphical User Interface: (3 of 5)-----------------------------------------------The Graphical user Interface for this router is designed for anyone with little or no experience in networking and WD's My Dashboard GUI does a very good job for those non-tech savvy people. The user interface is easy to use and you can setup your router in few minutes even if you know little or no networking skills. However, the use of big fonts and pictures and black background with tons of scrolling fields makes it harder to get to the menus especially in certain areas. I wish they had taken the GUI idea from DD-WRT and provided context sensitive help rather than having to read the manual for what some Greek and Latin options would do.Having said, The only reason it loses combined points here is because there are some oddities observed during configuration due to associated firmware problem wherein the user password gets reset to factory defaults and also for advanced users certain key options are missing like `RADIO' scheduling and `RADIO' transmit power settings and host of other options that one would expect to fiddle thru' from a high end router like this.Fully functional otherwise and the GUI is fast and responsive nothing really to be alarmed or concerned for regular users. Most of the above mentioned oddities and features can be easily fixed by a Firmware update. WD monitors their user Forums and albeit does fix them even though they do take some time to complete the feature requests.Performance: (3½ of 5)---------------------------------Rating the performance is a tough for a multi-function device like this as it has host of technologies in one box. Rating the whole solution bad just for one portion not working is going to be disastrous. So let me tell you that as a router (wired) and Storage networking (Wired) are super fast! - Thanks to the generous 7 Gigabit Switch ports and one Gigabit WAN Port. There is even a USB 3.0 port (Based on the blue color code) on this router! The NTFS attached USB drives and the NAS shares have excellent read and write speeds (Consistent 20+Megabits per second) which I consider very good SAMBA performance.The only reason it loses serious rating is due to the poor range and transfer speeds when using the 5 GHz band and radio streams. I still fail to understand the limitation with a high end product like this but it is true that 5 GHz technology for 300+Mbps rates and higher transfer rate suffers - as you get far away from router say 8-15 feet away the signal quality drops and the rates suffer.The same router also has simultaneous 2 GHz radio streams and those perform flawlessly and maintains 144Mbps rate as far as 50 feet away from the router. This tells me there is some basic issue which needs to be fixed by Firmware update. I am sure WD engineers are already working on this limitation.WD boasts the FastTrack technology for prioritizing traffic within the router based on type of information being sent back and forth. This Quality of Service (QoS) works fine for most types of web traffic especially `HD video' streaming or file transfer etc; But if you have some special applications (Torrents) that needs access to various inbound open TCP ports simultaneously it may conflict with the FastTrack (QoS) service or the firewall in the router. In such cases you may want to open up those ports ranges manually (There is a Menu in the GUI for that) or put that IP or PC in a DMZ and or disable QoS service altogether for better performance for that IP or application.Sharing: (3 of 5)--------------------The USB ports allow you to attach USB drives and printers. You can share the NTFS file system present on the attached drives as SMB shares and can be mounted as a drive letter to any PC on the network `wired' as well as `wireless' without using any additional software. You can also attach a USB printer and share that on the network. But For sharing the printer you need WD print share software on every PC that you intend to share the printer with.EDIT: July 30, 2012-------------------I had to lower the rating on the sharing aspect of this router as I found issues in SMB shares. The Android devices has issues in parsing the sub-directories from the SMB share. Also there is some weirdness noticed wherein devices like WDTV Live HUB and WDTV Streaming media player has issues in displaying folder contents when you use network shares. Not sure what the deal is but only Windows PC's are able to view the directory contents correctly. Looks that the SMB server has issues. I have notified WD customer support for getting this issue fixed.EDIT: May 30, 2013 (Gets 4 stars!)-------------------I had been patiently waiting for a new firmware update to fix the above mentioned issue to play video files from Android tablets. I am pleased to inform Amazon community that WD finally fixed this issue in Firmware Release 1.07.16 (5/21/2013) This also seems to be more stable firmware release and the router now works like a champ.WD has always listened to users on their community forums and WD does fix the problems (although it takes them nearly a year to do it)As promised, I have now edited this review and gave the respected 4 star rating.Summary: (3 of 5)----------------------This being marketed purely as a HD Dual Band router on the high-end spectrum of the market and at this price point there are serious competition from other lesser known brands that seems to perform adequately well with higher 300+Mbps transfers. But, The 7 Gigabit ports and super fast SAMBA performance (Wired) makes this router highly desirable. So, being fair and unbiased I decided to give a updated 3 star rating here.As the new firmware gets released and if I find that they have resolved the 5 GHz band range issues and SMB sharing issues I will revise my rating to full 4 stars!