Review: HP DreamScreen
Written on Sep 17, 2009 by Brian and filed under HP, Reviews
Editor’s Note: The HP DreamScreen comes in two versions, the DreamScreen 100 (MSRP $249) and the DreamScreen 130 (MSRP $299). The 100 features a 10.2″ display with 800×480 pixel resolution. The 130 has an 800×480 resolution and 13.3″ display. Otherwise the units are identical. Our review model is the DreamScreen 100.
HP has launched a new platform in the digital display space. I hesitate to call the DreamScreen just a digital picture frame, although it does do that. It also has a Pandora application, plays video, streams content from a networked computer, connects to thousands of Internet radio stations, interfaces with Snapfish and Facebook and has both wired and wireless Internet connections. So it’s more than a frame – it truly is a new platform.
HP DreamScreen Specs
- DreamScreen 100 – 10.2″ Display – 800×480 pixel resolution
- DreamScreen 130 – 13.3″ Display – 800×480 pixel resolution
- 2GB internal memory (1.5GB available)
- Contrast 350:1
- Stereo Speakers
- Headphone out jack
- USB Host and USB mini
- Media cards supported – CF, MS, MMC, SD, xD
- Video formats – AVI, MPG, MP4
- Photo formats – BMP, JPEG, PNG
- Audio formats – MP3, PCM, WMA, AAC
- Touch screen button
- Remote control
- Ethernet – WiFi
DreamScreen Setup
The DreamScreen packaging is thankfully minimalistic, with just the things you need, all nicely packaged. The DreamScreen can operate entirely on its own, but configuration is a little easier via the included PC software. Through the software you can configure username and passwords for the applications like Pandora, Facebook and Snapfish. The same interface can be used to drag and drop photos onto the frame – more on that later.
PC Screen
As noted though, the frame doesn’t need a PC to get setup. Screw in the metal stand, connect the power cord and you’re ready to roll. Once it’s powered on, you can go straight to photo/video viewing via memory card or configure the wired or wireless network to immediately gain access to the Internet-enabled applications.
Data entry is handled with an onscreen keyboard and the remote control. The system is easy enough to get along with – it’s not like you’re trying to craft detailed emails here. Using the keyboard to enter my wireless security code took a few seconds and I was quickly connected to the Internet.
From a build perspective, the DreamScreen looks great. The high-gloss black back, rounded edges and the way it all blends together makes the unit feel complete and well thought-out. It’s not uncommon in this space to see a display panel that was designed for no particular purpose, being jammed into a shell to make a digital frame. HP definitely designed the DreamScreen with a purpose and it shows; the end result is polished and clean.
DreamScreen Interface
We often ridicule digital frames because they have dreadful user interfaces. Because HP is viewing the DreamScreen as a platform, they spent a lot of time thinking about how users will want to interact with the product. And it shows – at power on, users are presented with an easy to understand scrolling list of applications. Using the remote or on-screen buttons, it’s easy to scroll through the list of options to pick what you want. They’re all clearly labeled with a launch icon for each.
Once in an application, there’s generally a brief setup screen. Users can also access settings via the options button on the remote. Navigation is generally very intuitive though. The only hiccup we’ve had is that to get back to the home screen to select a new application for instance, it takes a press and hold of the back button. It would have been nice for HP to add a clearly labeled home button on their remote. At this point users know what to expect when pressing a house-shaped button, manipulating a back button isn’t fluid.
We’ve talked a good deal about the remote already, and in terms of being able to do everything you need to do, it’s great. The 12 buttons do it all, including turning the frame on and off. When you’re done with the remote, there’s a little caddy on the back of the frame to house it. This is a small touch, but nice, as most frames just have you leave the remote nearby, adding clutter and a higher potential to lose the remote.
Aside from the remote, users can manage the frame with touch sensitive controls in the lower right corner of the frame. The controls remain hidden until your hand activates the sensor to light the buttons. The eight buttons handle all of the frame’s tasks – so in the event you lose the remote, you won’t lose any functionality. The buttons are responsive and it’s great that they fade away when not in use. However, they don’t always light up right away and it’s easy to make an accidental button press. I had to login into Pandora online a few times to remove accidental thumbs down ratings.
Memory/File Sources
HP has included just about any conceivable way to get files on the DreamScreen. There are two multi-card readers. The first handles the small cards including SD, MMC, MS and xD. The other slot handles CF and micro drives. If you have files on USB drives, no problem, there’s a USB host port for that.
The DreamScreen has 1.5GB of internal storage, after you delete the setup videos and stock art that come on the frame. Files can easily be transferred to the frame by copying from a memory card. There’s also the drag and drop method on the PC. Lastly the frame can be connected directly to a computer, where it will show up as an external storage device. The DreamScreen supports foldering – so it’s very easy to sort files by folder and control which ones are viewed in a slideshow for instance.
The ability to drag and drop files using the PC application is no small thing, this is only the second time we’ve even seen this method attempted. When setting up my frame, I took my 2009 folder of photos and just dropped it on the application. It took a while to move 700MB, but the job got done with minimal effort. Right now HP takes the entire files as they are, but I wouldn’t be surprised if along the way they add a feature that re formats the files for use on the frame. Loading full-sized images is a waste of storage space, but many users don’t know how to, or take the time, to re-size their images for a digital frame. You can also use the desktop software to manage your account information for the Internet-based applications.
If you want to take full advantage of the Internet connection, the DreamScreen can also stream files from a connected device on the network. The only trick here is there’s a little work required to enable file sharing on a computer and router. HP includes good documentation on how to enable this, but any time users have to edit router settings, there’s a certain percentage that will be frustrated. Even so, if you have a media server, this option is definitely nice to have and gives the DreamScreen a tremendous amount of flexibility.
DreamScreen Applications
Out of the box, the DreamScreen comes with several applications that are both geared toward sharing life’s memories and entertainment. HP is off to a great start with their application library. While there’s no public API that will let developers push the DreamScreen with new applications, HP fully intends to release more applications and firmware updates. In fact, our review unit has already found and installed a firmware update, which is good to see, we like HP being proactive about making the DreamScreen progressively better.
We’ll break down each of the applications below to give you a better understanding of what the DreamScreen can do:
Pandora
It’s easiest to start here because Pandora is easily one of the best applications on the DreamScreen. The integration is absolutely fantastic. The experience is similar to the PC or iPod flavors – users get access to all of their stations and songs play complete with cover art, track details and the ability to do thumbs up/down. Pandora is fully integrated with the user’s account, so thumbs up/down are recorded and saved, though it doesn’t appear that the DreamScreen application can show the thumbs up that users have issued through another interface. That’s likely just a bug that HP can resolve however.
The listening experience is certainly enjoyable, I currently have the DreamScreen on my desk and I leave it on Pandora a good portion of the day. The remote handles the volume, pausing and song ratings. Pandora will also play in the background as you run some of the other applications like photo viewer and slideshows.
HP SmartRadio
Access to thousands of Internet radio stations is promising. I was able to add some of my favorites like ESPN radio and Fox News, but not without issues. The way HP has you add stations is nearly unusable, unless you have a lot of time and patience. To add a station you can sort by location (country) or genre. So if you want radio from Afghanistan, you’re actually okay, since there are two stations to choose from, but go try to find your favorite station from the US. You can view them by most popular or alphabetically – both are horrible options for finding something you know you’re looking for. There’s no way to search by station name and you can’t drill-down to state or city. This issue is fixable though, we’ll see how HP responds.
It would also be nice to have a more immersive experience. After looking at what they did with Pandora, the SmartRadio screens are pretty blah. Adding additional data like a station logo, what’s playing (artist info) and the like would be a nice touch.
Like the Pandora integration, the Facebook application is pretty slick. While it’s not entirely full-featured, what you do get is a stream of status updates from your friends, organized chronologically. You can also browse their photo libraries by selecting a user. If you’re subscribed to events, there’s a tab for that as well.
The main downside is that you don’t get full access to the things friends post, only status updates. You also can’t issue status updates of your own, though you certainly could with the onscreen keyboard. Even so, the application looks good and is certainly a nice first effort.
Weather
HP has included a beautiful weather page in an integration with Weather Bug. The screen shows current conditions and a four day forecast. To select your city, just enter in the zip code or use the search feature to type in your location. The main problem with the Weather channel is that it only supports a single city, though the options screen leads you to believe there’s a way to enter more. In a future release it would be great to be able to view a localized video forecast. We’d also like to see a way to slice in the weather with other functions like the clock – especially in the morning.
Calendar
The calendar shows month views and users can page through by month to move forward in the calendar. We’re going to toss this feature in the useless category right now though. There’s no way to add or view events, they didn’t even include national holidays. There’s a lot more that can be done here, but for now it’s a total pass, unless you really want to know what day of the week October 13th is.
Clock
Beyond doing what you’d expect – display time, the clock can operate in a dual timezone mode, clock with calendar, or clock with slideshow. The latter is pretty useful, it makes for one of the better display options on the DreamScreen. The clock itself can be run in analog or digital mode, though there aren’t faces to choose from within those categories. The clock does shift from blue to red at 6PM however, to be a little more subtle in the evening.
If you’re using the DreamScreen bedside, you’ll be glad to know there are three alarm settings. There are a few sound options, but the frame doesn’t play a sample, so it’s impossible to know what they sound like unless you set the alarm, listen, then go back and repeat the process. You can also awake to music on the device. There’s not a visual indicator that an alarm is set and active, that would be a nice touch.
Video
The DreamScreen supports video playback of AVI, MPG and MP4 files. Unfortunately all the AVI files I moved over that were shot on a Canon digital camera struggled to play, often causing the frame to kick me out to the main menu after a few seconds. I know the DreamScreen can play video, the included videos looked great and played well. I’m not entirely sure why mine failed, but for now we’ll look at it as an isolated incident until more people experiment with video playback on the device.
Photo
Within the photo app users can browse their images by date, folder, view all or connect to the PC to see shared photos. From here users can also launch a slideshow, which has several options including 17 transitions and timing options from 3 seconds to 24 hours. Since the native resolution of the display is widescreen, there’s also an option to fit the images to screen, so there’s no black border. This option is on by default and I actually didn’t even notice my pictures were slightly edited, so I’d say HP did well here.
Music
The Music player supports a wide variety of formats including MP3, AAC and WMA. This is a comprehensive lineup, besting most other products in this class. Users can view their music by album, artist, genre or view a list of all songs. Along with songs stored on the device or attached media, the DreamScreen can stream music from the PC as well.
Snapfish
HP’s Snapfish integration is well done, users can easily log into the service on the DreamScreen to have access to their photos stored on their online service. Users can even launch a slideshow based on only these photos. There is however, no way to create a slideshow that includes data from Snapfish and photos stored on the device.
Setup
Not really an application on its own, but users can configure the device name, time zone, time and date format, brightness, network properties, time sync and the like. There’s also an option to set a time on and time off for the device, so it doesn’t run overnight. Users can also manually check for software updates, though the device can be configured to do this automatically, and there’s a self diagnostic routine to help users troubleshoot issues.
Display
The DreamScreen display is possibly the best we’ve seen on a device like this. HP has done well here to offer a high resolution display in both models, with vibrant colors and fantastic viewing angles. Users can control the brightness setting, the default is 10, the maximum. I’m actually surprised that at this level the colors look so good, they often get washed out at higher brightness levels. The blacks are held well and images with a lot of color aren’t over-saturated. Overall the display is very impressive.
The display panels are widescreen though, so users will need to edit pictures to get them to display properly in native resolutions, or let HP do the resizing work itself. As noted, we were pleased with the onboard editing the frame does on its own. The DreamScreen is also meant to be displayed horizontally, so it’s best to leave the portrait shots off.
Speakers
Generally we spend little time on the speakers in devices like this because they’re usually pretty bad. In this case though HP had to do better, with all the multimedia functions and all. The stereo speakers won’t blow anyone away, but they’re better than most notebooks and clock radios – and better than almost all other frames we’ve tested. I can listen to Pandora or the Internet Radio for hours and enjoy the experience, which is the key hurdle here. If you want more, there’s a headphone jack to add headphones or external speakers. Overall though we’re happy with the sound output.
Conclusion
There’s so much to love about the DreamScreen – the applications are generally very well done and HP is planning to offer more to expand the functionality of the platform. The display is fantastic as well. What HP is going to struggle with though to a certain degree is making the consumer understand just what exactly a DreamScreen is. They don’t want to call it a photo frame – it’s more than that. They can’t really call it a media player, that conjures up images of streaming Internet video with output to an HDTV.
It sits somewhere between, really trying to define that space generally referred to as the third screen in a home, the first two being the computer and TV. And if you look at that category and what’s out there now, HP has done a fantastic job of giving us something usable, something that adds value, in that third screen category. To this point, digital frames have attempted to accomplish such a thing, but they always fail on interface when they try to do much more than display photos. Even the online services like FrameChannel and Microsoft’s FrameIt fall well short in delivering a good experience.
So what HP has done with the DreamScreen is really define what the third screen can be. They didn’t just strap features onto an existing digital frame, the DreamScreen is new from the ground up. It’s what we said in the beginning, a platform. And it’s probably a platform that can finally get people to believe that the idea of the third screen is relevant.
Pros
- Fantastic display
- Great content integration from Pandora, Facebook, Snapfish
- Usable interface
- Future applications planned
Cons
- Some applications need help (Calendar, SmartRadio)
- Might struggle to get out of the shadow of “regular” digital frames
Bottom Line
The price point of $249 for the 10.2″ model and $299 for the 13.3″ model might give some buyers pause, but keep in mind that there are no service fees and all of the online content from Pandora, Snapfish and SmartRadio comes without cost too. Given what the DreamScreen can do out of the box, coupled with where HP is telling us they’re going to take the platform, the value proposition makes sense for those who want a screen that’s more than a digital frame.
4.5 stars out of 5 – Editor’s Choice
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