A hub is a hub is a hub. Or so you would think. What distinguishes a good USB hub from a lousy one are the details, and Keyspan gets almost all of them right.
The key merit of the Universal Serial Bus (USB) is its simplicity for users. You can plug and unplug with ease, at any time, without fear of hardware damage. Device drivers load as you need them. You can connect all sorts of devices  such as mice, keyboards, printers, handheld computers, and external storage devices  to the same ports, with the same cables, on Macs or Wintel PCs, desktops or laptops.
USB is useful enough that, until the recent introduction of the FireWire-equipped iMac DV, all of Apple’s iMacs and iBooks had USB ports, and nothing else, for expansion. Previous generations of Macs, on the other hand, included Apple serial ports for printers and modems, Apple Desktop Bus (ADB) connectors for input devices, and SCSI for external drives.
With USB, a single bus on your computer can, in theory, support up to 127 devices, but to do that you’d need a whole bunch of USB hubs to give you enough ports. And that’s where Keyspan hopes to come in.
Their simply-named Keyspan USB Hub has the basics: four “downstream” USB ports (the slot-looking ones), one “upstream” port (the square one), and the requisite funky translucent iMac-style colors  including Graphite, for those with dark-hued Macs or older beige models, or who don’t want everything in color anyway. It has a full compliment of power lights too, which illuminate the translucent housing attractively.
I perch my USB hub on top of a Kensington QuickTrieve CD-ROM/Zip disk storage unit, so it’s not sitting flat on my desk. The Keyspan hub stays fairly stable  despite a tipping problem I mention later in this review  because, unlike my previous USB hub, it has nice, grippy rubber feet. It also includes a colorless, translucent iMac style USB connector cable. (Some hubs don’t include any cables at all.)
Also unlike some others, the Keyspan hub includes an AC adapter. That’s good, because a few USB devices require more power than your Mac’s onboard USB ports can provide. It would certainly be annoying to get one of those devices and try it, only to find that you have to buy a separate power brick. No worries here.
My old Power Mac G3/266 has a Belkin USB card in it, and I was able to swap out my old no-name hub and replace it with the Keyspan, then reconnect my Logitech USB mouse and the PalmConnect USB adapter for my PalmPilot, all while the Mac was still running. Everything continued without a glitch. My cursor moved, my PalmPilot synced. I was even able to capture video from a camcorder with my Interex InterView USB and Strata VideoShop software, at its maximum resolution (320×240 pixels, 30 frames per second).
So far, so solid. I have only two quibbles with Keyspan’s hub.
First, there was no manual in the box. USB hardly needs a manual, but novice users might want at least some basic instructions on how a hub works. Telling them that hot-plugging USB is safe would also help. But the lack of a manual is no reason to pass this hub by.
More importantly, the upstream USB port (the one that connects back to the computer) is on the left side of the unit. In my case, with the hub on top of my QuickTrieve tower, the weight of the cables plugged into the front downstream connectors pulls the back of the hub into the air, so the whole thing is permanently tipped forward unless I position it very carefully. Were the upstream port on the back, the cables would probably balance, as they did with my old hub, and it would remain flat.
Anyone who wants to put their USB hub on the left side of their computer might also find it awkward to wrap the cable around to connect it. Sitting it on top of a tower like a G4 or a Wintel PC might leave a USB cable dangling down one side instead of dropping straight off the back. However, if you have an iMac, with its USB ports on the right side, and sit your Keyspan hub on your desk next to it, the arrangement would be ideal.
Keyspan has built a pretty, functional, and compact USB hub. At about $40 U.S., it’s decently priced, especially because it includes a groovy USB cable and a power adapter. It feels well-built, the color is nice and rich (at least on the blue one I got), and it’s just translucent enough to hint at the electronics inside. Since it has no moving parts, it will probably last through several generations of USB-compatible Macs if you keep it clean.
Other companies make hubs with seven downstream ports instead of four  for more money, of course. And many hubs have different cable arrangements. But if you don’t need a manual (and you shouldn’t), if four ports are enough for you, and if having your upstream USB port on the side works with your setup, then the Keyspan USB Hub is ideal. I’m keeping mine. I just may have to find a better place on my desk to show it off.
MacMice Rating: 4
Derek K. Miller
dkmiller@mymac.com
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