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D-link DIR 685 Storage Router
Rohan Naravane, Jan 21, 2010 1617 hrs ISTA router, photo-frame and NAS
Color screen, 2.5-inch internal hard drive bay, Framechannel and BitTorrent support, 2 USB ports
Laggy UI on the device, Small screen not ideal for photo viewing, expensive, only EXT3 format for hard drive supported
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Features and User Interface
The DIR 685 is an 802.11n wireless router. Unfortunately, it only supports the 2.4 GHz spectrum. Some other routers in the market have support for 5 GHz frequencies. The basic advantage of 5 GHz is that there's less interference from other devices than 2.4 GHz (on which many cordless phones operate). As mentioned above, it supports a 2.5-inch internal hard drive - which is great. We were able to easily read/write data to the drive over all the PCs connected to the router.
The only flaw we observed is that the device supports drives only in the EXT3 file format. Linux fans would know right away that EXT3 is a popular file format used by many OS distributions. So neither can you just pop in any FAT32 or NTFS drive in there and use it, nor can you remove that EXT3-formatted drive and use it directly with Windows. But assuming that one wouldn't be swapping drives so often, it's something users can live with. 
Moving on, let's take a look at the User Interface on the device. It is operated using the touch buttons at the side. The main issue with it is the UI's laggy behavior - which makes it somewhat irritating to use. On the other hand, the coolest thing about the UI is FrameChannel. It is an online content delivery service right to your device. You have to register at their website and then select from an array of widgets. Thus, you can have Facebook/Twitter updates, Facebook photos, RSS feeds, Blog updates and a lot of other stuff streaming on to the DIR 685's screen. This feature makes best use of the screen in our opinion; now only if the device had a bigger screen.
The Statistics menu will show current internet upload/download activity. The Photos tab will let you slideshow photographs, but only from the internal hard drive. It is silly to see that you can't just connect a USB media device at the back and view photos from it. There are a few things missing from the UI. For example, it does not display the progress of your BitTorrent downloads - which would have been nice. It would have been nicer if it let you control downloads directly via the router.
The router's interface (accessed via a web browser) is easy to use. It has the regular array of options and settings like a regular wireless router. The built-in BitTorrent manager lets you download files directly to the hard drive - without the need for the PC to be on. This is indeed a cool feature for those who like to suck the life out of their unlimited internet connection. But the interface is pretty basic. There is no option to schedule downloads or select individual files from a torrent. Also, it is surprising to see that there's no regular manager for downloading files from HTTP websites.
Lastly, the two USB ports at the back let you connect a storage device, scanner or printer - which can then be used over the network. But you can't simply access it directly via Windows Networking. You need to install a bundled utility called SharePort. We would've rather preferred a simple plug-and-play solution.
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