D-Link DIR-685 Wireless Storage Photo Frame Router Review

This D - Link DIR-685 router is an model of what you get when you let locomotive engineer get wild and shove in everything they intend is cool into a production . And that ’s just the type of Cartesian product we like to see .

The toll : $ 230 or so on Google Shopping

The Verdict : Very interesting and very promising . It ’s more expensive than a standard router , but the fact that it does have a low photo frame ( it ’s only 3.2 inches ) and space for a 2.5 - column inch laptop tough drive makes it impressive . All of these features work , but they shape in varying degrees .

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The Router : D - Link ’s not inexperient at create networking devices , so it ’s not surprising that the DIR-685 works quite well as a wireless hub for all your stuff . Wireless kitchen range is comparable to an Airport Extreme or a Linksys WRT610N , and reaches all three floor of my theatre , through various amounts of walls . Speed is also on equality with the other two routers , and can wirelessly stream file cabinet with little problem to various media players , as we compensate below .

The Media Streamer : Again , the engineers at D - Link managed to squeeze in a bunch of functionality that you would n’t expect . You get a BitTorrent downloader , an iTunes server , an FTP server , net file sharing with user management and even a UPnP waft to picture player .

The iTunes server works incisively as you ’d opine , and shove MP3s onto its severe drive immediately evince the same songs under the shared iTunes library . The video streaming works pretty flawlessly to the Xbox and the PS3 , same as if you were streaming from your microcomputer or from a Windows Home Server . Plus , there ’s D - Link ’s SharePort technical school so you’re able to plug in a printing machine or an outside hard drive to the two USB ports , making for even more networkable computer storage in a comparatively small software program .

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The only trouble is that the combination of a hard drive and a devotee inside a compact router makes the thing much , much louder than a standard router . It ’s probably on equality with Xbox 360 ’s level of ambient noise when the rooter is on , which everyone know is quite distracting when you ’re trying to do anything .

The Photo Frame : It is a photo frame , but a 3.2 - column inch photo anatomy is like docking your iPhone and phone that a photo frame . But yeah , it is a photo material body , and it does start the standard FrameChannel software , which we ’re not really fans of .

FrameChannel is an well-heeled way for exposure frame maker to add functionality without developing it themselves . It has RSS feed , word , conditions , sports , plus Photosharing site like Flickr , Facebook , MobileMe , Picasa , Photobucket and smugmug to actually get photos onto your frame . It ’s “ stable ” , for the most part , but it ’s nothing pleasurable to use .

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The DIR-685 ’s touch buttons are n’t that responsive either , when navigating the frame , so you ’re often stuck adjure things multiple times to see if the command ’s perish through . But it is as good a photo figure as any other picture figure using FrameChannel .

The Whole Package : With all these different components , you ’re bound to get some conflicting parts . The problem we have is that if you desire to use this as a photo physical body , you ’ll want to place this in your living room or your sleeping room or kitchen somewhere where you may see it quite often . This friction with the occasional noise generated by using it as a media streamer , because of the fan and hard crusade noise . If you take out the hard drive , the noise goes off .

At $ 230 , it ’s a somewhat self-coloured package , give you three bits of functionality usually find separately . Provided you may order it somewhere out of the way to hide the dissonance , the DIR-685 is a success . [ DLink ]

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