SlashGear reviews the nice-looking D-Link DIR-685 Storage Router. Is it a NAS router or a digtal photo frame?
“You’d be forgiven for mistaking the D-Link DIR-685 Xtreme N Storage Router for a cheap digital photo frame, at least from just glancing at it. Dominated by a 3.2-inch LCD display, and lacking obvious giveaways such as external antennas, it’s a stylish way to upgrade to draft-n WiFi. There’s also plenty of interest inside, with an internal hard-drive bay and surprising file-sharing flexibility.
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Of course, in the end this is a wireless router, and so has to be judged primarily on that instead of just its whiz-bang feature set. The good news is the WiFi b/g/n support and gigabit Ethernet ports; the bad news is that there’s neither WiFi A nor 5GHz on offer. The absence of the former is unlikely to affect most home users, but leaving out 5GHz support seems a clueless decision for a flagship router. In a nutshell, the DIR-685 uses the 2.4GHz frequency band (as do various intercoms, short-range radios and other wireless gadgets); high-end rival routers offer the 5GHz, as an either/or or a dual-radio setting, which allows you to switch high-priority traffic (such as streaming HD video or VoIP) to the more stable higher frequency.
Admittedly, you’ll need a 5GHz-compatible WiFi adapter on any device you want to use with such a router, and they’re still in the minority compared to 2.4GHz, but to simply omit the technology altogether seems short-sighted on D-Link’s part. Still, performance on both the wired and wireless sides was excellent, with better coverage than we’ve seen on most WiFi routers. We used a Seagate Momentus 5,400rpm 80GB drive that D-Link supplied for our testing, and BitTorrent proved particularly impressive, notching up download speeds up to six times faster than with our Belkin comparison router.”
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The review concludes with:
“There’s always a fear with convergent products like the DIR-685 that they could be “jack of all trades and master of none”. To be fair, there are some things the D-Link does more seriously than others; we can’t see its 3.2-inch display replacing a standalone digital photo-frame, and the internal hard-drive is obviously limited to the maximum capacity of a 2.5-inch HDD rather than a more capacious (and faster) 3.5-inch. The 2.4GHz limit is also annoying, considering the price, while the whining fan is just plain unacceptable.
Nonetheless, if you have sensible expectations for the onboard storage – and don’t forget, with user-account control, BitTorrent, FTP, remote network management and more, this is still better than a simple USB drive – and can tune out the fan noise then the D-Link DIR-685 is an excellent router and a capable media streamer. The display may seem gimmicky but all but the most jaded will find some useful application for it”
The whole review can be read on SlashGear.
I’m looking forward to getting my hands on one of these to play with, err, to test ;-)
