Time Capsule is an Airport wireless router with an inbuilt 500GB or 1TB hard-drive. It’s available for pre-order now, but won’t be shipping until February. Costing €299 for the 500GB model and €499 for the 1TB version, considering the specs, it does represent decent value for money.

While integrating a wireless router and a server grade hard-disk may be a stroke of genius, the fact that the Time Capsule is specifically designed to work with Leopard’s Time Machine is what makes it so intriguing. If you’ve been following this blog, you’ll know that I, along with a large proportion of Leopard users, have been experiencing problems using Time Machine to backup to a NAS drive. This announcement confirms that using Time Machine to backup to a a network drive will be possible.

With Mac OS 10.5.1 this particular set-up won’t work, so either the 10.5.2 Leopard update that’s on the way will enable this functionality, or Time Capsule will be provided with the requisite software. Although new versions of iTunes and Quicktime are available for download now, there’s no sign of the 10.5.2 update yet. Given that Time Capsule won’t be shipping until February, we may be waiting a while yet for Apple to make this release available.