Lets first just get some things out of the way before I talk about the quality of what the device DOES do lets talk about what it does not, yet claims to do.
Downright Lies
--------------
The following quotes are from the HP site itself:
"The HP DreamScreen is a gateway to the Internet using your wireless network to access
weather info, Snapfish and your favorite web destinations."
This is just untrue. There is no integrated web browser. It has three web `apps' on it: SnapFish, Pandora, Facebook. That's it. It does not read RSS feeds, or do much of anything you probably want it to do, simple things like display news or recipes.
"Stay current with social network sites like Facebook"
`Like' facebook? There is only Facebook: nothing else.
"Be organized with a built-in alarm clock & calendar."
This is laughable. Wondering how to sync the calendar with outlook or google or anything; maybe even just add appointments, I finally consulted their online documentation. Here, seriously, is the feature list for the calendar `app':
"View the current month, press right or left to view the next or previous month."
BWAH HA HA HA... *sigh*
"Touch-enabled controls--Get fast, easy access to information and entertainment with simple touch controls embedded in the display"
This is referring to some buttons around the bezel of the screen and is just so untrue they would have to change the marketing campaign in Europe or get sued. This does however remind me of the old In Living Color sketch where the handcapped superhero always says he is `not handicapped, but HANDY-CAPABLE!'.
"Videos--Watch home movies and video clips in full screen Its simple!"
It's as simple as taking your video, recompressing it to a supported video codec, resizing it to a specific resolution, and then physically transferring it ot the device -so simple grandma could do it! (with gordian knot, virtualdub, CCCP, and all those other video tools she has)
The Screen
----------
Resolution
The thing is a frickin' 300 dollar photo frame, but it's resolution is 800 x 480, this equates to 0.38 megapixels, at the time the frame came out, the average cheap point n shoot ranks 9 to 10 megapixels: this is well over twenty times the resolution of the screen!
Because of this, it can take 10 full seconds to load a photo and downsample it to 800 pixels from it's original resolution. This makes browsing photos a pain, and loading photos from your camera cards nearly useless. Power users will use photoshop or xnView to batch all their content to 800 pixels.
There is aliasing galore, as 800 pixels is the resolution of many phones and handheld devices, not 13' photo frames!
NOTE: The official specs on the HP website and elsewhere say the DreamScreen 130 is 800 x 480, however, it's own documentation on the CD is came with claims a resolution of 1280 x 800. I called HP and they confirmed the lower resolution for the DreamScreen 130. There may be a middle road as some sites report: "13.3' Widescreen800 x 480 pixels upscaling to 1280 x 800 pixels", which would mean you purchased a 1280×800 screen and they didnt feel like making the software go higher res for the more expensive display. Jesus.
Color Reproduction
It is a cheap TN panel, the gamma of your images widely fluctuates depending on the angle they are viewed. I would be ok if they had a low resolution but used a nice IPS, SIPS, or OLED panel, but this is just unremarkable. The black point is a dark shade of grey, in all seriousness, the panel quality seems on par with something like the panels they use in the dashboard of a Prius, or other industrial UI readouts.
Streaming / Network
Streaming requires lots of Microsoft Windows Media software and services running on a PC server in your house that is always on, they relied on this instead of doing the footwork themselves. If you were under the impression from their marketing that it could read files off samba shares or work with Macintosh, you would be wrong.
Software / User Interface
The software is pretty terrible. It is very clunky and unresponsive. Many times it does not recognize that physical media has been inserted and must be rebooted. The UI graphics themselves show terrible compression artifacts.
When you bring up the on screen keyboard to type in, say, the name of the device, it clearly shows buttons like [ [ [.com], and others to make it easier to browse the web, however there is no web browser! There are other places in the print ads and UI itself that refer to features the device just does not have!
"Touch Screen"
The device claims to have a `touch sensitive screen', and IT DOES! A small area around the bezel of the screen has botons that can be pressed/touched! This product is in NO WAY a touch screen device, and has no touch sensitivity, other than the buttons on the bezel, the marketing is a lie.
Open Source?
On the CD that ships with it, they have a ton of readme files showing they used a lot of GPL'd code, however the source installer did not work on my windows 7, x64.
Conclusion
Pros:
* They used Linux and GPL'd code so they will have to release theirs soon, hopefully it will be taken under the wing of the open source community and all these issues can be fixed by hard working college students and kids in their spare time.
* The packaging/box is very high quality with a great look and feel
Cons:
* The screen is low res and low quality
* The device is way overpriced for the quality of it's screen and software
* The docs and UI refer to features that just do not exist
* No battery, it must always remain plugged into the wall
* Super-glossy, all you may be seeing is windows!
* Software-wise, the average cellphone is vastly superior in extensibility and quality (browsing photos, playing mp3s, videos...)
* The UI looks like a rip of cell phone UIs, but only in pictures... There are no smooth animated transitions, nothing in common with the user interfaces they seemed to want to copy. To an experienced person, the UI feels like something HP outsourced to Asia and sent them a poor art-bible of the end product they were expecting...
* The device seems unfinished
Photos look great on this and the widgets seem to work pretty well, though you're restricted to those that HP wanted to install. No Flickr? But there are serious problems here. Everything takes a LONG time. Opening up Settings seems to take much of a minute (okay, closer to 15 seconds). It's slow. And the user interface? It looks like it was designed to be a touch screen interface but then that turned out to be too expensive. So you're always scrolling around the screen getting to exit and open buttons. It's pretty painful.
Pros:
Looks nice
Good resolution
The Internet Radio bit seems to work well
Cons:
SLOW!!!
Only the widgets that HP wants
Dreadful and painful user interface, you're just going to be unhappy working with it
Bugs all over the place (radio station genres, spelling errors, sometimes the slideshow button works, other times it doesn't)
I'd wait for version two of this. Let the bugs get fixed, have them improve the user interface, get some more widget options, and install a faster processor. Then it'll be worth something like the asking price.
Buy HP DreamScreen 130 13-Inch Wireless Connected Screen Now
I got this for my mom as a Christmas present. I got her a Westinghouse 14 inch frame a couple of years ago and that set the size bar pretty high. With the HP Dreamscreen I hoped to improve upon the previous frame in several areas.
With the previous frame, found that having a digital frame is a lot of work if you have to change out the pictures on a memory card all the time especially if you don't live near your parents. So I was hoping to find a way to do this remotely. The Snapfish option sounded promising (but why no flickr, photobucket or imageshack?). Facebook seemed sketchier to me, as Facebook already crunches your photos when you upload them and doesn't even present them THAT well on a PC screen.
We finally settled on the snapfish option and save the images at 800x480 and that works very well. I am very pleased with the images on the screen. The odd size is a bit of a problem, but overall the images look great and are crisp and bright.
Pandora radio is pretty cool. The sound is above average but it only goes so loud and starts to get tinny at higher volumes. It is a neat "gee-whiz" feature though. I haven't played with HP radio yet.
Facebook has been buggy for me. I even updated to the latest firmware when I fired the frame up for the first time (and another bright spot was that the frame logged onto my wi-fi flawlessly and easily.) But Facebook is SLOW and the pictures don't look great from Facebook, as I suspected they would not. The Facebook feature would actually make the frame worth buying for that alone if only those pictures were better quality.
The remote control works well, the controls are ok. Not great, but there are worse out there.
I spent a bit of time trying to change the slideshow settings for the Snapfish account before I realized that you have to be in the PHOTOS section. Press options there and you change the transition, length of time each photo shows on the frame and various photo options for ALL of the different modules (facebook, snapfish, etc...)
One good point to HP is the packaging. When you open the frame, it is almost like opening a jewelry case. The box is well designed and everything inside is protected nicely and the presentation is outstanding. If the product lived up to the packaging it would get 5 stars all the way! As it is, I would rate this as 3 stars if you are looking for more than a picture frame, but as a wireless digital frame, it is a five star unit and it has exceeded my expectations.
Read Best Reviews of HP DreamScreen 130 13-Inch Wireless Connected Screen Here
After reading some of the reviews, I had low expectations. This is a great piece of gear. It really is no slower than your home pc would be. It is a great device for streaming music, photos, etc. The internet radio is worth the price. Hook to your stereo system and listen to hundreds of stations, many with cd quality. If you have a home network set up this is nothing else that compares. I have owned mine for only a couple of weeks and there have been 2 firmware upgrades which added enhanced features.
Want HP DreamScreen 130 13-Inch Wireless Connected Screen Discount?
Sadly, the digital photo frame market is mostly flooded with no-name products that are seriously lacking in several areas. One would expect a "world class" company like HP could offer a much better product, but so far as several others have reported in their reviews, HP has largely failed. This product looks great on paper but is disappointing in reality.
Consider this: You can buy (from HP no less) a very nice complete netbook computer with a better higher resolution screen, a much faster processor, WiFi, a full keyboard, expensive Li-Ion battery, hard drive, etc. for the SAME PRICE as this photo frame which has none of those things. So why does HP use a substandard 800 pixel display that makes your photos fuzzy? Why do they use a little toy processor that makes everything so slow as to be painful? Why isn't there a motion detector to turn the frame off when nobody has been in the room for a while to save energy?
Why also, isn't this device UPnP-AV or DLNA compliant so it can automatically pull pictures off your PC, NAS or home server? Other less expensive devices offer this functionality. The "internet" features of this device are severely limited. You can buy devices at a third of the price that do much more (but granted have a smaller screen). And you can buy devices at a third of the price with a better, higher resolution screen, than the DreamScreen.
I would suggest waiting until more companies figure out the "high end" digital frame market. There are new wireless offerings from Buffalo, D-Link and others that conform to home media standards (UPnP and/or DLNA) that put the DreamScreen to shame and can do much more. Hopefully such competition will force HP, and others, to get their act together.
Bought my first Blu-Ray player and a new Yamaha receiver from Amazon to hook up to my big Mitsu DLP TV, and ordered a couple of this inexpensive cables with my order.
