Customers Reviews
2009-10-15
Far Better Than I Expected
I have to admit, when this first arrived for me to review, I was like, "What could I ever possibly use this for?" After all, I don't do the whole digital photos things, I don't need a touch screen to check the weather or my Facebook status. I have a laptop for those things and that's actually portable. Yes, at first glance, The HP DreamScreen looked like an overpriced piece of junk.
However, once I started fiddling around with it, I realized it actually can be useful. I will admit there were some problems at first getting the DreamScreen to synch up with my network and laptop (Inspiron 1525 if you're curious), but once I did I found it to do three things that made this worth owning.
1. Pandora radio. The DreamScreen has Pandora built in and it doesn't even need to be synched with my laptop to work. This is great as I don't have to use any of my computer's memory or the like to listen to music when I am working. It also synchs with the DreamScreen's built in alarm which is rather nice.
2. Music. I can stream music from my laptop to the DreamScreen. The built in speakers with Dreamscreen are amazing and much better than anything I have on my laptop, so this has become my preferred way to listen to music outside of my Ipod when I am jogging.
3. Videos. Video footage looks pretty good on here. However, I have a blu-ray play and a high definition screen on my laptop, so I can't really say I would personally use this. For those without that level of video quality on their own computer (or even TV), this might come in handy.
For everything else though, this is a pretty expensive gadget that really doesn't do anything that makes it worth the price tag. Why does someone need a one way Facebook account or a seperate screen to check the weather? Is this for technophobes.
If you just need a digital photo frame, there are better and cheaper options. HP hopes you'll pay more for a bunch of bells and whistles. While these extras are cute, they're also pretty useless when you come right down to it. Maybe for half the MSRP this would be a DECENT purchase, but at the current price, I can't imagine anyone will really get their money's worth out of it.
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2009-10-15
Needs a touchscreen
This is a very beautifully packaged item, I really enjoyed opening it up and setting it up, except when peeling a sticker off the front, some of the paper/sticky stuff stayed stuck to the sleek, shiny (easy fingerprintable) front. It was very easy to set up and connect to my network, although it's a bit of a pain to input stuff into it.
The remote feels very flimsy and I could definitely see it wearing out long before the DreamScreen unit itself, but I did like the little holder for it on the top. Overall, I prefer using the navigation on the bottom right corner of the unit, although you can't really see where it is until AFTER you touch it there, which certainly makes the unit look nicer/sleeker, but requires one more fingerprint smudge in the lower-right corner to get things going. Plus I keep wanting to touch what I see on the screen to navigate and...it's not a touchscreen so I can't. This feels like version 1.0 of something where what I really want is like, v3.5 or something.
The DreamScreen allows you to access your Pandora account, which is pretty cool. It turns out I already had a long-forgotten Pandora account so I didn't have to go and create one before being able to use that feature, I just had to tortuously enter my account info, although to HP's credit, they do include some thoughtful buttons on their input interface, such as ".com". I enjoyed using Pandora on the DreamScreen much more than I ever had on my computer...it just seemed to work out better there, like I wasn't worrying about using another browser window and more processing power, it's nice to have Pandora "on the side". Oh, or on the wall, because the Dreamscreen can be mounted on the wall, which seems like a very nice way to get it up and out of the way although it is going to make the remote less accessible, so I will probably be instinctively trying to poke the screen even more.
One thing I did not like about using Pandora is that if I went to use other features on the unit, the music would stop. Why can't I say, use Pandora AND check the weather at the same time? I also really like the clock/calender feature AND the weather feature but don't understand why I can't view all at once...it seems like there is plenty of room on the screen.
I received this item for free, and I was seriously questioning whether I would pay so much for it but perhaps I would, because even though it seems pricey to me for what you get and the no touch screen thing, it just so happens that a few months ago I finally got fed up with my half-broken alarm clock and decided to get all fancy replace it with a SqueezeBox, which cost close to what a DreamScreen does. Well, I didn't like the Squeezebox as an alarm clock (or clock in general, or taker-upper of lots of space) but it turns out that the DreamScreen does everything I wanted the SqueezeBox to do. The alarm clock feature works great (could have a few more options wrt repeatability, but I appreciate that it did have a few, such as repeating daily, not on weekends, and being able to set multiple alarms) and the clock face is nice and large, and it not only has a small footprint, but putting it on the wall will make it basically NO footprint. As an alarm clock it's A+++++ in my book...but it still needs a touchscreen.
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2009-10-13
Gorgeous digital picture frame that does much more
This is absolutely a gorgeous digital picture frame with plenty of built in memory for your favorite pictures. Plus, it has a clock, calendar, facebook, video and music capabilities. This screen looks and feels beautiful - high quality, first class all the way. It does a great job playing music and videos (I tested it playing PSP video format and plain old mp3 for music) and has a surprisingly good sound for a digital picture frame, which is basically what mine gets used as. And it does that beautifully - handles large picture sizes no problem, scales perfectly, and it is a gorgeous screen. I like the alarm function, definitely a useful add-on, and I like it's music player/radio capabilities - very nice addition that adds even more to it's usefulness. The weather is a great extra too. Setup on wifi was fairly straightforward, assuming you have connected something via wi-fi before, if not, get a geek friend to do it for you. Sometimes the overall controls are not the most intuitive, but if you tinker with it a bit you get used to it. Connecting it via wi-fi to your computer to transfer media was a little trickier - I finally figured out that using the included software, it would only say it recognized it when the dreamscreen was on it's home page - on any other screen it would say it didn't find it. Odd, but workable once I figured that out and once you get that working you can drag and drop files onto the dreamscreen's internal memory. It also plays flawlessly off of SDHC cards - I used internal memory for pictures and an SDHC card for music and video. Streaming capabilities are what most fascinated me with this, and sadly on that score it fell a little short. That may not be entirely the fault of the screen, I did notice that sometimes Windows Media Player would change it's setting from sharing media to not sharing media for no good reason at all. When I did get it to connect and stream I had to be very patient - streaming a large music library over wi-fi would take forever for it to pull up all the content - you may think it's locked up, but it seems most of the time it's just trying to pull up the media. However it has locked up on me several times trying to stream media - I just power cycle it and it's fine. I'm not a patient person, so this was very disappointing. I have a wireless "n" router and I'm sure most of the slowness was due to the screens interal Wireless "G". Or it could be windows media player, I'm just not sure - I have heard in other forums that windows media player is not the best to use for media streaming, but I haven't had the need or inclination to try anything else when all it's other features work so well. When it did stream, music playback was choppy, so I just chalked this up to a feature thats not quite ready for primetime and perhaps it will be much more usable in the future. On another note - HP - why on earth did you put a large sticker around the edge of the screen? Not cool at all! It was so hard to get off I really thought I was ruining the screen just trying to get all the sticky residue off (a self stick vinyl adhesive would have been way better) I guess that's why they include the cleaning cloth, it works great to polish it up nicely after you finally manage to pry the sticker and it's remains off of the beautiful screen. I do like it's ability to download updates and update itself - but mine did not do so automatically, I had to go into settings, then info and tell it to search for updates and then it did update just fine. As long as you accept the media streaming quirks or don't plan on streaming, then I definitely recommend this - it is far and away the most beautiful digital picture frame I have ever seen, and has plenty of neat little extras to play around with. With it's alarm and calendar functions, you could use this as a gorgeous bedside alarm clock and have it display pictures when not in use. What I wish it did have, was more internet content or the ability to add your own internet content and better streaming abilities.
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2009-10-13
Our newest electronic addiction!
As I type this review, I am sitting here with ear plugs in because my husband is using the music function on this product...same thing he has done every night after work since we got it. He is addicted to it! I love it too, this is a really cool product. We are both electronics/gadget junkies and this is one of our all-time favorite products. The music (Pandora) feature is our favorite. You pick the channels you want from the website and it sets it up for you and you have access to your favorite music or artists (wide variety, even stand up...we have a George Carlin channel). Based on what you set up, it also suggests other artists who are similar that you might like. The sound quality far exceeded my expectations.
We have another similar system, but this one blows it out of the water by far. The picture quality is superior to the one we have and to all others we looked at in stores when looking them over for gifts last Christmas. The overall look is high-quality too. Even the box it came in is designed well.
We are the type of people who detest instructions and we didn't need to use them with this, just got it and it was easy to figure out on our own. For me, if I have to read over instructions bit by bit to figure out how to use it, it takes the fun out of using a product. I just like to play around with it and this one was very easy to navigate and user-friendly.
The weather feature is our third favorite feature beyond music and photos.
We have absolutely no complaints on this item and would definitely recommend it to anyone considering it or giving it as a gift.
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2009-10-05
A Solution Looking For A Problem
The HP DreamScreen is at its heart, a digital photo frame that's begging to be much more.
As with so many of 2009's consumer electronics, the DreamScreen is yet another example of a company trying to bolt on extended connectivity to popular sites. This time around, we have access to Facebook, Pandora, and Snapfish via built-in wired and wireless networking.
Setting up the DreamScreen is fairly painless. It quickly found and connected to my WPA2 network without any problems, and the built-in applications all ran as I had expected them to, albeit, very slowly. I thought that the slowness may be due to the product being so new, and immediately checked for a firmware update. Sure enough, there was one. However, it didn't seem to improve the response time.
The DreamScreen is quite large. Probably larger than what I'd want on my desk, and a bit too large for a normal end table. And while the back has slots to accept every type of flash media under the sun, it also makes the unit itself quite deep, making wall mounting an unattractive option.
As I had said previously, the included applications all work pretty much as I had expected them to. Facebook is a passive stream of status updates or photos. Snapfish can be pointed to someone's account, and Pandora seems to do the right thing if you already have a Pandora account with stations set up. The weather application updates quickly and often, and is visually appealing. The inherent problem with all of these, is that they aren't integrated or well executed.
So, mixing photos between any of the applications is just not possible without navigating between the different applications. On one hand, I can understand that the DreamScreen doesn't claim to do it, but if you're going to bundle multiple photo options, being able to see them all in a rotation seems like a natural function to me. And while Pandora works, the controls are not well thought out (e.g. making the music stop) and as you'd probably expect from a device like this, the audio quality is not very good.
Ultimately, you end up with a product that you'd normally "set and forget", but that really needs a lot of interaction to make any of the features work. I could see having this mounted somewhere that I could enjoy glancing at the pictures, and notice every once in a while that it's telling me what the weather's like, or that one of my friends has posted new pictures on Facebook. But in execution, I'd need to go find the remote, and navigate to each function. If I'm going to take the time to do that, why wouldn't I just grab my computer? (Or if I didn't have one, why wouldn't I spend about as much money on a netbook?)
The image quality is decent, but not nearly as good as what you'd see on the similarly sized Sony DPF-V900 9-Inch Digital Photo Frame (and a popular choice, now that I see it on another review). Again, it does what HP says it does, but it doesn't do it as well as it could, and seems almost an afterthought.
The DreamScreen really begs the question: "What need does this fulfill?"
If you're looking for a photo frame, you have better options from Sony, Kodak, and others.
If you're looking for an easy link to Facebook, the interface and one-way nature of the device puts a wet towel on that.
If you're looking for a portable media center, the audio quality is a serious barrier.
If you're looking for a "keep Grandma updated with something easy to use" device, you're hitting limitations with the interface (and wireless availability).
I just can't think of a single reason to buy this over another product, other than to say "Hey, check out this frame. Look at everything it can do."
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