Jason Dunn
02-15-2010, 03:00 PM
<p><img src="http://images.thoughtsmedia.com/resizer/thumbs/size/600/dht/auto/1265765423.usr1.jpg" style="border: 0;" /></p><h6><strong>Product Category:</strong> Digital Media Frame</h6><h6><strong>Manufacturer:</strong> <a href="http://www.shopping.hp.com/store/product/product_detail/KY616AA#ABA" target="_blank">HP</a></h6><h6><strong>Where to Buy:</strong> <a href="http://astore.amazon.com/digitalhomethoughts-20/detail/B002GJTZBI" target="_blank">Amazon.com</a> [Affiliate]</h6><h6><strong>Price:</strong> $208.82 USD</h6><h6><strong>Specifications:</strong> 10.1 inch LCD screen, 2 GB on-board storage, 802.11b/g WiFi, 10/100 megabit Ethernet, memory card slot (SD, CF, MS, XD), infrared remote control.</h6><p><strong>Pros:</strong></p><ul><li>Gorgeous screen and overall design;</li><li>Easy to use user interface unites social networking, media playback, and more;</li><li>Handy remote that stores in a compartment in the frame.</li></ul><p><strong>Cons:</strong></p><ul><li>Sluggish performance;</li><li>Incredibly limited video support (no HD!);</li><li>Unintelligent software design.</li></ul><p><strong>Summary:</strong> HP describes the DreamScreen 100 as a "wireless connected screen", and in some ways the vague nature of the product name defines the experience using the product. Even HP is a bit confused, because they don't list the DreamScreen with the <a href="http://www.shopping.hp.com/can/computer/categories/photo_frames/1/accessories?jumpid=in_R329_prodexp/hhoslp/ipg/lateralnav_photo_frames" target="_blank">rest of their digital photo frames</a>. The DreamScreen, available in 10.2 inch and 13.3 inch screen sizes, is a device that, while ambitiously trying to do more than any digital media frame before it, manages to fail at pretty much everything. It's a shame because the product looks fantastic and has a beautiful screen. That, however, is not enough to save it.<MORE /></p><h1>Getting the DreamScreen Set Up</h1><p>Unpacking the DreamScreen was a fairly luxurious experience - the inside of the box is lined with what feels like velvet. Swanky! In the box you get the DreamScreen itself (I'm reviewing the 10.2 inch screen model here), a screen stand, power adaptor, remote control and battery, miniUSB cable, a cleaning cloth, and the paperwork and software on CD you'd expect. The hefty-feeling stand screws into the back, meaning you need about 5.5 inches of depth wherever you decide to put this.</p><p><img src="http://images.thoughtsmedia.com/resizer/thumbs/size/600/dht/auto/1265508418.usr1.jpg" style="border: 1px solid #d2d2bb;" /></p><p><em>Figure 1: The stand after it's been screwed on.</em></p><p><img src="http://images.thoughtsmedia.com/resizer/thumbs/size/600/dht/auto/1265508466.usr1.jpg" style="border: 1px solid #d2d2bb;" /></p><p><em>Figure 2: The remote control in its holder - a great design decision.</em></p><p><img src="http://images.thoughtsmedia.com/resizer/thumbs/size/600/dht/auto/1265508871.usr1.jpg" style="border: 1px solid #d2d2bb;" /></p><p><em>Figure 3: The left side of the frame.</em></p><p><img src="http://images.thoughtsmedia.com/resizer/thumbs/size/600/dht/auto/1265508657.usr1.jpg" style="border: 1px solid #d2d2bb;" /></p><p><em>Figure 4: The right side of the frame.</em></p><p>The small remote has a holder in the back of the frame, which is a nice touch. From the back of the frame, if you look on the left side, you'll see a 10/100 Ethernet port, a USB port, a miniUSB port, a headphone jack, and the power button. On the right side, there's a CompactFlash card slot (type I/II), and a memory card slot that supports SD, SDHC, MMC, Memory Stick, Memory Stick Pro, and xD cards. This is one well-equipped frame - and it also has 2 GB of built-in storage (1.5 GB is available for user storage), built-in speakers, and 802.11b/g WiFi. You can check out the <a href="http://www.shopping.hp.com/shopping/pdf/ky616aa.pdf" target="_blank">full specs at HP [PDF]</a>.</p><p><PAGE /></p><h1>Getting the DreamScreen Set Up (...continued)</h1><p><img src="http://images.thoughtsmedia.com/resizer/thumbs/size/600/dht/auto/1265508539.usr1.jpg" style="border: 1px solid #d2d2bb;" /></p><p><em>Figure 5: To call this screen reflective when it's turned off is an understatement!</em></p><p><img src="http://images.thoughtsmedia.com/resizer/thumbs/size/600/dht/auto/1265508994.usr1.jpg" style="border: 1px solid #d2d2bb;" /></p><p><em>Figure 6: The setup is guided - it tells you exactly what it needs you to do.</em></p><p><img src="http://images.thoughtsmedia.com/resizer/thumbs/size/600/dht/auto/1265509047.usr1.jpg" style="border: 1px solid #d2d2bb;" /></p><p><em>Figure 7: WiFi setup was fast and easy.</em></p><p><img src="http://images.thoughtsmedia.com/resizer/thumbs/size/600/dht/auto/1265509123.usr1.jpg" style="border: 1px solid #d2d2bb;" /></p><p><em>Figure 8: The on-screen keyboard is a bit tedious, but it gets the job done. I was glad I was using WPA instead of WEP for security!</em></p><p>After I powered up the DreamScreen, I was presented with a beautiful user interface for the initial setup which consisted of selecting the time zone (I was amazed to see Alberta on the list) and nothing else. The main interface loaded up, and it looked great - nice, big icons. When I tried to bring up something that required Internet access, the DreamScreen informed me that I needed to configure network access. It asked me if I wanted to configure a wired or wireless connection, and after I selected wireless, it scanned for networks, let me select my home network, and presented a large on-screen keyboard for me to enter the WPA key. The entire process was fast, simple, and very user-friendly...until they got to the end of the process where they presented the IP address, gateway IP, DNS, etc. No regular person would need to see that, and HP should tuck it away into the advanced settings somewhere. The final step should be a simple "Hey, you're connected!" message and that's it.</p><p>The DreamScreen is easily the most sophisticated device of its type that I've ever tested; it can perform software updates, self diagnostics, and can be customized in many ways. Shortly after powering the unit up, it informed me there was a software update - it downloaded and installed v.1.5.2.0, released in October 2009. <PAGE /></p><h1>The Screen: Wow!</h1><p>The 10.2 inch screen is 800 x 480 resolution - commonly referred to as WVGA - which happens to be a 15:9 aspect ratio. The off-axis viewing angles are fantastic; looking at the screen almost sideways still gives you a surprisingly good picture. The screen is, in a word, gorgeous - and perfect for sitting on a bookshelf or desk. HP doesn't reveal what screen technology they're using, but in looking at a wide variety of my photos - which are tweaked on a colour corrected monitor - they all looked fantastic. I was initially unsure if the 800 x 480 resolution on a 10.2 inch screen was going to be sufficient, but photos looked superb. HP really hit the ball out of the park with their choice of screens.</p><p><img src="http://images.thoughtsmedia.com/resizer/thumbs/size/600/dht/auto/1265525324.usr1.jpg" style="border: 1px solid #d2d2bb;" /></p><p><em>Figure 9: None of my pictures do the screen justice. It looks great.</em></p><p>The other hardware aspects - built-in WiFi, memory card reader, USB port - all worked flawlessly. The overall design aesthetic of the DreamScreen is killer - it's a minimalistic design that doesn't draw attention to itself unless it's displaying something. I'm not a fan of the extremely long metal support stand though - HP could have made it 50% shorter, but I suspect they were trying to make it hard to knock over. If it's on a shelf, how likely it is to get knocked over though?</p><h1>It All Happens on the Home Screen</h1><p>The core functions of the DreamScreen are found in each of the home screen icons:</p><h2><strong>Weather</strong></h2><p>It's unfortunately not intelligent enough to locate what city it's in, even after connecting to WiFi. This is a ridiculous oversight that HP should correct. It's also pretty silly to show me Toronto as the weather location after I've already told the DreamScreen I'm in the Alberta timezone. At any rate, once I configured it by looking up my city, the weather display was functional (showing me temperature, wind, "feels like", high and low for today, and a four-day future forecast). You can't add multiple cities and move back and forth between them; an unfortunate limitation and one that anyone who likes to travel will notice.</p><p><img src="http://images.thoughtsmedia.com/resizer/thumbs/size/600/dht/auto/1265509416.usr1.jpg" style="border: 1px solid #d2d2bb;" /></p><p><em>Figure 10: The Weather application.</em></p><h2>Clock</h2><p>The clock does what you'd expect, and perhaps a bit more. It can be configured to show a single time zone, two time zones, a clock with a calendar, or the clock with a photo that changes every five seconds. The clock + photo option is pretty cool. The clock can be digital or analog, and it also displays the day of the week, date, and time zone. You can set up to three different alarms, and each alarm can be configured to play the music on the device as the wake-up sound, or play "rock", "smooth jazz", or "jam" sounds.</p><p><img src="http://images.thoughtsmedia.com/resizer/thumbs/size/600/dht/auto/1265509460.usr1.jpg" style="border: 1px solid #d2d2bb;" /></p><p><em>Figure 11: The Clock application.</em></p><p><img src="http://images.thoughtsmedia.com/resizer/thumbs/size/600/dht/auto/1265509540.usr1.jpg" style="border: 1px solid #d2d2bb;" /></p><p><em>Figure 12: The Clock application with the clock + photo option set.</em></p><h2>Calendar</h2><p>The calendar displays a month view...and that's it. There are no options for multi-month display, and no options to sync with any online calendar services. If you need to know that February the 27th is a Saturday, this is where you'd look - but that's all it does.</p><p><img src="http://images.thoughtsmedia.com/resizer/thumbs/size/600/dht/auto/1265509518.usr1.jpg" style="border: 1px solid #d2d2bb;" /></p><p><em>Figure 13: The Calendar application.</em></p><p><em></em></p><h1><PAGE /></h1><h1>It All Happens on the Home Screen (...continued)</h1><h2></h2><h2>HP SmartRadio</h2><p>Having streaming radio on the DreamScreen is a nice touch - the speakers don't kick out much volume, but you can connect the DreamScreen to external speakers via the headphone-out jack. When you first start up the SmartRadio application, you're presented with a search screen that allows you to find radio stations to your liking, either by genre or by location. Again, some IP-based intelligence would enhance this scenario - the radio should know where I am and offer me local radio stations automatically. Once you've added at least one streaming radio station, it will be listed on the favourites list. This is what displays when you first start up SmartRadio - up to eight favourites can be added. All in all, the SmartRadio feature works fairly well; you can toggle the radio off or on with the OK button on the remote, but SmartRadio stops playing when you load the clock for instance - why? Thankfully the slide show button works, so you can immediately fire up a slide show when listening to the radio.</p><p><img src="http://images.thoughtsmedia.com/resizer/thumbs/size/600/dht/auto/1265509653.usr1.jpg" style="border: 1px solid #d2d2bb;" /></p><p><em>Figure 14: The SmartRadio search function.</em></p><p><img src="http://images.thoughtsmedia.com/resizer/thumbs/size/600/dht/auto/1265509713.usr1.jpg" style="border: 1px solid #d2d2bb;" /></p><p><em>Figure 15: The list of SmartRadio favorites after I added a bunch of stations.</em></p><h2>Snapfish</h2><p>Snapfish is HP's online photo printing/sharing service, and it's inclusion on the DreamScreen is either going to be completely useless or fantastic depending on whether or not you use Snapfish. I happen to have a Snapfish account, so I was able to test this feature, but what I'd really want to see is a SmugMug option for instance. After inputting my email address and password on the on-screen keyboard one character at a time, I was able to log in and see the Snapfish demo album, and the album of photos I'd uploaded. I could browse the demo album and it would display the photos, but my own album showed up blank - no photos. I logged into my Snapfish account on my desktop computer and verified there were 60 photos there, but the DreamScreen still wouldn't show me my pictures. It's bad enough that the DreamScreen is locked into Snapfish, but to not display my photos is a pretty huge failure.</p><p><img src="http://images.thoughtsmedia.com/resizer/thumbs/size/600/dht/auto/1265509875.usr1.jpg" style="border: 1px solid #d2d2bb;" /></p><p><em>Figure 16: The Snapfish application.</em></p><p><img src="http://images.thoughtsmedia.com/resizer/thumbs/size/600/dht/auto/1265509990.usr1.jpg" style="border: 1px solid #d2d2bb;" /></p><p><em>Figure 17: Hey, where are my SnapFish photos?</em></p><h2>Facebook</h2><p>Facebook is everywhere - even on your digital picture frame! Loading this application was similar to the SnapFish application; pressing the Option button on the remote lets you login using the on-screen keyboard. By this point I was wishing the screen was a touch-screen, or at the very least, it had the intelligence to auto-complete previously entered email addresses or passwords. Thankfully, HP doesn't swap the password characters to asterisks as you enter it. Much to my confusion, the first attempt at logging in to Facebook resulted in an incorrect username/password error. I had an extra dot in my email address, so once I fixed that by re-entering the address - there's no option to fix it character by character - I tried logging in again. Error. I re-entered my password from scratch, and still couldn't get in. I fired up my Web browser, logged out of Facebook, then logged back in using the same information I was putting into the picture frame. I even had my wife give it a sanity check; all my credentials were correct, but the DreamScreen wouldn't let me log into Facebook. Just like the SnapFish problem, this is a significant failure of the product.</p><p><img src="http://images.thoughtsmedia.com/resizer/thumbs/size/600/dht/auto/1265510058.usr1.jpg" style="border: 1px solid #d2d2bb;" /></p><p><em>Figure 18: If I could get it to work, apparently I'd be able to see status updates, photos, and events on Facebook.</em></p><p><img src="http://images.thoughtsmedia.com/resizer/thumbs/size/600/dht/auto/1265510111.usr1.jpg" style="border: 1px solid #d2d2bb;" /></p><p><em>Figure 19: No Facebook for me!</em></p><p><PAGE /></p><ul></ul><h1>Media Playback: Get Ready for Some Bad News</h1><p>So how does it do with media playback? It's mostly bad news. I copied a bunch of different media files onto a <a href="http://astore.amazon.com/digitalhomethoughts-20/detail/B000W1RV0Y" target="_blank">16GB Patriot Xporter USB flash drive</a> [Affiliate]; it's a very fast flash drive. The videos files included a 960 x 720 h.264 file, a 352 x 240 MPEG1 file, four different 720p h.264 files, a 1080p WMV file, and a 720 x 480 WMV file. The photo files were all in JPEG format, ranging in resolution from 8 megapixels up to 12 megapixels. The screen is only 800 x 480 in resolution, but given the looks I've seen on the faces of family and friends when I've tried to explain the concept of resolution, I thought it was more realistic to test the frame with full resolution images. The average person is going to copy the photos they have on their computer - they're not going to re-sample them to a lower resolution. Lastly, I copied over two albums in MP3 format.</p><p><img src="http://images.thoughtsmedia.com/resizer/thumbs/size/600/dht/auto/1265510567.usr1.jpg" style="border: 1px solid #d2d2bb;" /></p><p><em>Figure 20: When you connect a USB flash drive, it offers you three different media playback options.</em></p><h2>Video Playback</h2><p>The video support is, in a word, awful; MPEG1, MPEG2, MPEG4 (h.264), and that's it. Support for h.264 matters the most to me, but it's shocking to see a product not support WMV. No support for AVI Divx and Xvid is also a miss - and there are a lot of Quicktime files out there. Worse, it shows files that it can't play - you'll select the file, click play, watch the screen fade to black and stay black for five seconds, then return you to the file view. It also shows you folders with no video files in them - why would I want to see the folder for a music album in the video view? Finally, there's no support for HD resolution files of any type as far as I can tell. All those video files you've been capturing with your Flip HD or HD-capable point and shoot (or DSLR) camera? You can't play any of them on this frame. Of the eight sample videos I had on the USB drive, only one would play; the 352 x 240 MPEG1 file. That's a file I encoded in 2004, <em>six full years ago</em>. The video support in this product is so embarrassingly weak HP shouldn't have included it as a feature until they could get it right. It's really that awful.</p><p><img src="http://images.thoughtsmedia.com/resizer/thumbs/size/600/dht/auto/1265510674.usr1.jpg" style="border: 1px solid #d2d2bb;" /></p><p><em>Figure 21: Those are all videos - but the DreamScreen 100 can't play any of them.</em></p><p><img src="http://images.thoughtsmedia.com/resizer/thumbs/size/600/dht/auto/1265510736.usr1.jpg" style="border: 1px solid #d2d2bb;" /></p><p><em>Figure 22: A Liz Phaire video in MPEG1 format encoded in 2004 was the only video that would play.</em></p><h2>Photo Playback</h2><p>Photo support, as you'd expect, is pretty good. Browsing a USB flash drive where images are stored in separate folders is a somewhat lackluster experience; rather than showing you a random thumbnail of a photo inside the folder, it shows you a generic folder icon. Once you get inside the folder, it shows you photo thumbnails (10 per screen), and clicking to the right will load the next screen of thumbnails. It doesn't read ahead to pre-process all the other images in the folder, so when you move to the next 10 photos, you have to watch as it draws the thumbnails. Amazingly, it seems to have no on-board caching mechanism for photos, so when you go back to previous screens you've already been on, you'll watch it re-draw the photo thumbnails. That's a poor user experience.</p><p><img src="http://images.thoughtsmedia.com/resizer/thumbs/size/600/dht/auto/1265510818.usr1.jpg" style="border: 1px solid #d2d2bb;" /></p><p><em>Figure 23: Folders on the USB flash drive are shown without thumbnails.</em></p><p><img src="http://images.thoughtsmedia.com/resizer/thumbs/size/600/dht/auto/1265510902.usr1.jpg" style="border: 1px solid #d2d2bb;" /></p><p><em>Figure 24: The photo thumbnails are generated 10 at a time, with no caching.</em></p><p>Lastly, when you're looking at one photo full screen - and the screen really does look fantastic - the software isn't reading the next image and loading it into memory. Pressing next to load a 10 megapixel image, it took nine seconds to load. That's not quite "hand on a hot stove" passage of time, but watching that little blue "loading" line for nine seconds is painful. I tried the same set of pictures on a SanDisk Extreme Class 10 SDHC with a 30 MB/s speed rating, and the load time was no different. Desperate to see something less painful, I re-sized the same images down to 800 pixels wide so they were tiny 250 KB JPEGs. The result? Load times of one second from picture to picture - but you still have to watch that little blue loading line as the next one loads. The lack of read-ahead caching kills this aspect of the product.</p><p>One feature I liked in the pictures application was the date sort function - it allows you to view pictures taken today, the last seven days, the last 30 days, the current month, or the previous year. Once you get a DreamScreen loaded up with photos, having this method of viewing your pictures makes this much easier.<PAGE /></p><h1>Media Playback: Get Ready for Some Bad News (...continued)</h1><p> </p><h2>Audio Playback</h2><p>What about audio support? Can they possibly have trouble with something as simple as playing back MP3 files? Well, when you load the music application, be prepared to wait about 12 seconds for your USB device to show up. And, rather than scanning your storage devices to show you a unified list of music, you need to drill into the USB menu item, and watch as it displays every folder on the USB drive - including ones that have no music in them. Seeing a trend here? This sort of "show the user all the folders and let them find the right one" is simplistic software design that was abandoned by smart developers years ago. There's also a weird bug that displays an unknown album with no songs in it.</p><p><img src="http://images.thoughtsmedia.com/resizer/thumbs/size/600/dht/auto/1265511128.usr1.jpg" style="border: 1px solid #d2d2bb;" /></p><p><em>Figure 25: Folders are shown even if there's no music in them.</em></p><p><img src="http://images.thoughtsmedia.com/resizer/thumbs/size/600/dht/auto/1265511236.usr1.jpg" style="border: 1px solid #d2d2bb;" /></p><p><em>Figure 26: No album art!</em></p><p><img src="http://images.thoughtsmedia.com/resizer/thumbs/size/600/dht/auto/1265511291.usr1.jpg" style="border: 1px solid #d2d2bb;" /></p><p><em>Figure 27: Nice interface, but I'd have liked to have seen album art instead.</em></p><p>HP doesn't seem to be aware of this "metadata" thing either - they show you the file names, and nothing else. So if you're like me and name your files (Artist) - Song.mp3, all you'll see is a list of files that have truncated file names that look identical. Embedded album art is not shown, so the DreamScreen shows you these large thumbnails with a generic CD icon. Once you manage to find your song through random clicking, the rear-facing speakers are about what you'd expect - it sounds like a clock radio. When the music is playing, is displays three CDs with different coloured cases. Album art would look great here, but the software reads neither the embedded art inside the MP3 files, nor the folder.jpg image in the folder.</p><p><img src="http://images.thoughtsmedia.com/resizer/thumbs/size/600/dht/auto/1265511356.usr1.jpg" style="border: 1px solid #d2d2bb;" /></p><p><em>Figure 28: Finally, some album art!</em></p><p>Curious to see if things were any better if I copied the albums off the USB flash drive and into the internal 2 GB of storage, I kicked off a copy of an album of 256kbps MP3 files. Two minutes and four seconds later, the process was finished - and I was impressed to see all of the above complaints addressed. Once the files are copied over, they're indexed based on metadata. Artist and song information shows up, and so does album art - including when you're playing the songs. Here's the problem though: with only 2 GB of internal storage, I don't see people copying over very much of their music collection. I expect, instead, for people to put their music on a memory card or USB flash drive and play it off that. With the crippled functionality I mention above, that will prove difficult.</p><p><img src="http://images.thoughtsmedia.com/resizer/thumbs/size/600/dht/auto/1265511399.usr1.jpg" style="border: 1px solid #d2d2bb;" /></p><p><em>Figure 29: Playing back MP3s.</em></p><p>Thankfully, some of the functionality I expected exists: when listening to a song, I pressed the slide show button on the remote, and after a couple of seconds, the photos I'd copied over to the local storage displayed on the screen. When I had no photos on the internal storage, pressing the slide show button did nothing. If the functionality is so badly crippled when using content on removable storage devices, HP should ship the DreamScreen with 4+ GB of storage and automatically prompt to copy content over whenever a memory card or USB flash drive is connected. Weirdly, the music stopped playing when I loaded the clock application. Why?</p><p><PAGE /></p><h1>Desktop Component</h1><p>HP includes a CD with the DreamScreen, and the software it comes with allows you to wirelessly transfer files to your DreamScreen. It's a pretty simple affair: after you install the software, you get a drag and drop zone that allows you to easily transfer files to the DreamScreen. It took one minute 12 seconds to copy 10 files (28.4 MB), and the files are resized as part of the process - they take two seconds each to load rather than the nine seconds I saw with my original resolution images. Given that my smaller photo shoots tend to be 30 to 60 photos, and my major photo shoots (such as vacations) easily top 500 pictures, you'd have to wait several hours to copy photos over.</p><p><img src="http://images.thoughtsmedia.com/resizer/thumbs/size/600/dht/auto/1265524908.usr1.jpg" style="border: 1px solid #d2d2bb;" /></p><p>I also transferred a music album (18 MP3s, 69.3 MB in total), which took four minutes and 23 seconds. Unfortunately it also copies over the album art JPEGs that Windows Media Player and the Zune software creates - so if you copy files over this way (on a folder basis), when you're looking at All Photos in the photo application, you'll see a bunch of low-resolution album art images. This is a poor user experience and HP should add some intelligence to skip files like this. And lastly, given the limited video support, users will see this error screen frequently:</p><p><img src="http://images.thoughtsmedia.com//dht/auto/1265525780.usr1.png" style="border: 1px solid #d2d2bb;" /></p><h1>And There's One More Thing...</h1><p>One of the best features I've seen on other picture frames is the ability to subscribe to an RSS feed. I use <a href="http://www.smugmug.com/" target="_blank">Smugmug</a> to share all of my photos with friends and family - one of the great features they offer is an <a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/JasonDunnsGalleries" target="_blank">RSS feed of all my published galleries</a>. That means as soon as I publish a new gallery, anyone subscribed to the gallery RSS feed would get a notification. As you can imagine, a wireless picture frame that automatically updates itself with the latest photos is a killer scenario for grandparents. What could be easier than turning on your picture frame and seeing new photos downloaded from an RSS feed? Sadly, the DreamScreen can't deliver this functionality. Worse, with only a SnapFish application, HP is ignoring Flickr, Windows Live, Smugmug, ZenFolio, and other popular photo sharing services.</p><h1>Wait for the Next Version</h1><p>All in all, the DreamScreen is a product that screams "VERSION 1.0!". It has too many compromises to deliver a smooth, fluid experience to consumers. I don't know what CPU/GPU HP is using to drive the device, but it's simply not fast enough. Every time you start up a task (photos, videos, etc.), the screen goes black for two to five seconds, then you watch for another three to four seconds as a progress indicator tells you the task is loading. When you're standing there staring at the screen, waiting for things to happen, it feels like a long wait.</p><p>The DreamScreen 100 is underpowered and lacking both support for needed video codecs and resolutions (like, say, that whole "HD" craze going on right now), and the software is lacking both polish and smart functionality. HP should look at integrating a Tegra chip to get the power this product needs. I don't know if this product was rushed to market, but it feels like it was, and that's a shame. It needs significant work for it to be worth the $249 USD asking price, and as it stands right now, I wouldn't recommend it to anyone under any circumstances. Rarely have a seen a product from a major computer manufacturer that has missed the mark so badly. I see potential - a lot of potential - for this product, but HP needs to refine the rough edges of this product and significantly enhance the current feature set.</p><p>In reviewing this product, I was reminded of the <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=abPDbxmHOPI" target="_blank">HP iPAQ 310 Travel Companion GPS</a>. It was a product with great potential, but one that was ultimately flawed. It held the same type of promise - it was a GPS that also boasted media playback capabilities, but they were equally limited. If HP had spent more time improving the end user experience, it would have been a superb product. Instead, HP never improved it and as far as I can tell, it's been killed off after only one version. I see a lot of potential in the DreamScreen and hope that HP will address the shortcomings in a future version.</p><p><em>Jason Dunn owns and operates <a href="http://www.thoughtsmedia.com/" target="_blank">Thoughts Media Inc.</a>, a company dedicated to creating the best in online communities. He enjoys <a href="http://photos.jasondunn.com/" target="_blank">photography</a>, mobile devices, <a href="http://www.jasondunn.com/" target="_blank">blogging</a>, digital media content creation/editing, and pretty much all technology. He lives in Calgary, Alberta, Canada with his lovely wife, his son Logan, and his sometimes obedient dog. He still doesn't own a photo frame of any sort - is that weird?</em></p><p><em></em><img src="http://images.thoughtsmedia.com//ppct/auto/1240336793.usr1.gif" /></p><p><strong>Do you enjoy using new hardware, <a class="iAs" href="http://www.digitalhomethoughts.com/news/show/93798/dell-s-inspiron-mini-10-reviewed.html" target="_blank">software</a> and accessories, then sharing your experience with others? Then join us on the <a href="http://www.thoughtsmedia.com/reviewteam.php" target="_blank">Thoughts Media Review Team</a>! We're looking for individuals who find it fun to test new gear and give their honest opinions about the experience. It's a volunteer role with some great perks. Interested? <a href="http://www.thoughtsmedia.com/reviewteam.php" target="_blank">Then click here for more information.</a></strong></p><p><img src="http://images.thoughtsmedia.com//ppct/auto/1240336793.usr1.gif" /></p><p><a href="http://cmp.ly/Publish/user/CmpLy.php?cid=2" target="_blank">DISCLOSURE OF MATERIAL CONNECTION</a></p>