Design
D-Link's 10-inch photo frame has a fairly unassuming design with a default all-black frame, although a white magnetically clipped on cover frame is also provided. A small stand clips onto the back of the DSM-210 to allow for portrait or landscape orientation, although this is purely an aesthetic choice. The frame has no in-built sensor to detect which way it's mounted, so your pictures will display the same way regardless.
The DSM-210 isn't a touchscreen frame, but it does have small touch-sensitive buttons at the base of the frame for very basic photo selection, which leaves most of the rest of the features on the provided remote. This is small and looks not unlike the type of remote control often found with very cheap portable DVD players. More on that shortly.
Features
The LCD panel at the heart of the DSM-210 is a 10-inch, 800x480-pixel LCD that can display JPEG pictures either from its 1GB internal memory, USB flash drives or SD/MMC storage cards. That leaves users of DSLRs with Compact Flash cards out in the cold, which is an annoying limitation.
The big drawcard for the DSM-210 is meant to be its wireless network integration, although it also sports a 10/100 Ethernet port if cabled networking is more your thing. This allows for wireless home picture streaming from any UPnP source, as well as online internet sources such as Flickr, Picasa and Facebook. To enable the frame's internet features, however, you've got to first enable an online account with D-Link's "Framechannel" service through a PC, even though the frame is net enabled. We still don't quite get why.
The DSM-210 also features a motion sensor which automatically powers down the frame when no motion is detected in front of it for a set period of time.
Performance
The DSM-210's remote control is small, looks cheap and ultimately proved pretty painful to use. That's not just painful in the sense that we often had to jab its buttons a couple of times to get on-screen responses, but also in that the buttons are solid and quickly become uncomfortable under your thumbs after only a small amount of work. Entering the password for our test wireless network nearly had us screaming in pain. For what it's worth, the DSM-210 does support WPS set-up, and we'd strongly suggest you utilise that if your router supports it. Your digits will thank you.
For a photo frame that promises a lot in terms of functionality, we were struck by how functionally limited the DSM-210 actually is. To pick one example, when you're browsing photos from memory cards or your home network, you can opt to copy them to the frame's 1GB of internal memory, which sounds good. Except that you can only copy files one at a time, no matter what, and while you're doing the copying, the frame itself just pauses until the copying is complete. It's a massive pain if you've got a lot of photos that you'd like to put on the frame to have to do this on an individual file basis.
Registering the frame via D-Link's online service isn't tough per se, but it is rather quirky, as one of the set questions asks which room of the house you're going to put the frame in. Also, if you do tell it the frame's located in Australia, you're then asked which city it's in, but only given the choices of — and we're directly quoting the options here — "Adelaide, Brisbane, Canberra, City Of Greater Wollongong, Gold Coast-Tweed, Melbourne, Newcastle, Perth City, South Brisbane or Sydney". We had no idea Australia only had 10 cities in it, or for that matter that Brisbane was two of them.
Once activated online, you can choose to link your online photo repositories to the frame, as well as a selection of RSS feeds, including CNET's own Crave blog. The online features do work, but they're notably a bit slower than looking at the same content on the same network via a PC.
Image quality on the 10-inch screen was acceptable from a distance, but as you might expect with a resolution of 800x480, things get pretty jagged at close distance. This gives the frame some utility if you're going to stick it on a mantelpiece, but if you were considering a frame for your desk, this isn't it.
Ultimately we came away from the DSM-210 quite unimpressed. While the feature set promised on the front of the box is pretty impressive, it sits in stark contrast to the price, the quality of the display and the unit's inherent limitations.
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