The SOHO has a number of features that don't fit neatly into one of the previous categories of this review, so I'll use my favorite review shortcut: the List:

• You can restart the Sonicwall from the Management Interface as well as from a button on the back of the box

• You can Import and Export router settings (to make it easy to restore your settings after a firmware upgrade), or reset them to factory defaults

• Firmware upgrading is done via a browser Java applet that worked just fine with my Netscape 4.5 browser.  You do have to download the firmware file to a machine on your LAN first, however. You can also ask to be notified when new firmware is available

• You have five built-in Diagnostic tools including DNS lookup, Traceroute, Ping, Packet Trace, and "Tech Support Report" that will dump a file that can help SonicWall engineers help you debug problems with your router.

• There's a full featured LAN DHCP server, which you can control pretty much everything on, including Lease time and reserving IPs according to MAC address.  You can also shut it off!  The DHCP Status screen shows you all active IP to MAC address bindings.  You can't, however, manually end a DHCP lease.

I think, finally, that's it for features. 

As I hinted back on Page 1, the SOHO does not have routing speed to match its impressive feature set.  Although it uses a 33MHz Motorola 68030 processor with 4MB of ram and 2MB of Flash memory (and tells you so right on the first screen that you see when you enter the Management Interface) this processing power doesn't match the speeds of the more recently designed inexpensive routers. Read 'em and weep...

Although these numbers are plenty fast for most broadband connections, they're no match for the speeds of the more recently designed boxes like the Netgear RT314 / ZyXEL P314 twins.  (Of course the 314's features and admin interfaces are no match for the SOHO's either!)

Since I've started to use netIQ's (formerly Ganymede) free QCheck utility for my wireless speed tests, I thought I'd give it a shot with the SOHO.

The Throughput tests were consistent with my Wireless testing findings in that they showed higher numbers than my browser-based file transfer test shows.  This is because Qcheck does not include any protocol overhead, such as headers, trailers, flow control, and connection setup in its calculations (see the Qcheck FAQ for more info).  The UDP Streaming test was the strongest evidence that the SOHO's router just couldn't keep up with faster data streams, especially on the LAN to WAN test.  The nice thing about using the QCheck program is that it's easy to use and freely available so you can run your own tests.

I have mixed feelings about finally testing the SOHO.  On one hand, I finally have first-hand experience with this much-praised product and can more confidently answer questions about it.  On the other hand, it's definitely going to be hard to go back to looking at less-featured products and be impressed!

If I were SonicWall and wanted to own the low-cost router market, I'd do a couple of things:

• get a faster processor and whatever else needed into this puppy to speed it up.

• bring back the single port version (which you can still find as a WebRamp700s...but the one priced for $200 or so) but with a 10/100 autosensing LAN port

• get the price as low as you can...$150 would be excellent

• promote the hell out of it

And if they could get the SOHO to host Quake3 and Unreal Tournament servers without disconnect problems, then they'd really have something!