back to article D-Link Xtreme N DIR-685

Ah, convergence, that buzzword of the 1990s – so often promising a lot, but delivering little. Evidently, D-Link is toying with the convergence concept with the neatly packaged Xtreme N DIR-685. This four-port Gigabit router features 802.11n Wi-Fi, a 3.2in LCD panel – billed as a digital photo frame – and Nas functionality too. …

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  1. Jerome 0

    The future

    - Iron out the various compatibility problems.

    - Expand the screen to fill the front face, and make it touch-sensitive.

    - Throw in a media streamer.

    All of a sudden, you have a device everyone will want. I expect we'll be seeing such things everywhere in a couple of years time.

  2. bertie bassett
    FAIL

    why photo frame?

    Electronic Photo Frame - something you put on display in the lounge/bedroom etc to show to yourself / friends pictures of family, friends and places

    Router - something that is plugged into the ADSL filter on the BT Master socket, often under the stairs, on a sheld or otherwise hidden away from view as the layout of the house requires.

    What next TV's on Fridges?

  3. Matt Bryant Silver badge
    FAIL

    Never buy anything labelled "xtreme"

    Anything so labelled is usually anything but extreme. It seems the DIR-685 "out-of-the-box" device still needs a fair amount of configuration and tech knowledge to get all the features working, too much for the average user. Maybe the Xtreme bit refers to the extreme frustration of the average user trying to get the USB ports working, or trying to get the latest firmware. D-Link used to make reallly good and simple ADSL routers, why can't they go the extra mile and make the whole thing just work out-of-the-box, it's not like other NAS devices haven't already?

  4. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    "certainly looks the part"

    I suppose "part" is a synonym for genitalia, and it certainly looks like c0ck.....

  5. Stu
    Megaphone

    I vowed never to...

    ...buy another D-Link product in my life after experiencing living hell dealing with their idiotic and pushy indian tech support people - they kept ringing me up about a support call I'd put in, fair enough its customer 'care' - but every time I dealt with them, there was simply no fix to my problem.

    Can't remember what the issue was any more but we're talking basic functionality. Eventually I had to tell them to stop calling me, and close the call, despite it being totally unresolved. They had no way of escalating the issue to anybody higher, let alone the engineers.

    And put it this way, this jack-of-all-trades but master-of-none product doesn't exactly make me want to rush down to the shops after it. Especially with its £200 price tag.

    I tell you what D-Link - you double up on the screen size, make it capacitive touch screen, media streamer (yeah 'Jerome 0') and generally make it a bit more compatible and faster (making the Gigabit Ethernet a little less pointless) oh and just make it suck a little less, sell it for 200 notes or less cos as it is its sinfully overpriced, oh you'd also have to promise direct support contact with the original developers, and allocate their time solely to me, THEN I might just take a second look, no promises to buying it though!

    All in all, you've got your work cut out for you D-Link!

  6. Anonymous Coward
    Grenade

    Toasty

    Where's the heat dissipator?

    that's got all the makings of a red hot mofo

    hotter and hotter till it unsolders all the ic's from the pcb

    Have owned D-Link before, never again

    Anyway, weren't Cisco trying to shut the d-link arm down or something?

  7. Anonymous Coward
    FAIL

    re: Toasty

    "Anyway, weren't Cisco trying to shut the d-link arm down or something?"

    ITYM LinkSys.

    Some of their products are just as bad as D-Link's, but it' still a totally different company.

    Fail - 'cos that's what this device does.

  8. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    "buying a Draft-N router, LCD panel and 2.5in Nas separately would cost a lot more"

    would it?

    a quick look on ebuyer finds a draft-N router for £34.99, 3.5" NAS for £34.36 and 7" digital photo frame for £24.99. thats less than a ton for the lot. i wouldn't mind having all these devices in one but i'm not about to pay double the price for the privilege, even if they'd actually done a decent job of it.

  9. Goat Jam
    FAIL

    Always the case

    Nobody *ever* gets these devices right and I can't for the life of me understand why it has to be so damned hard.

    A few years back Asus developed a promising unit, but burdened it with 100Mbit ethernet. This one can't handle more than 1 user and doesn't support Linux, even though I'm quite sure it actually has Linux under the hood (didn't bother with the entire article.

    Why?

    I guess we will have to wait for apple to build one only to charge us twice as much.

  10. Alan Thompson
    FAIL

    NAS - NOT!

    It doesn't really have NAS. To call it NAS it would need to support NFS or CIFS/SMB at a minimum. Anything else (FTP/HTTP/DNLA/UPNP) is NOT NAS!

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