Adam Turner at PC Authority has the low down on D-Link’s Australian Boxee plans, but the most interesting part is that they’re working on content partnerships. Apparently they’re already talking to the ABC and Channel 7 (and the 7Plus service in particular), as well as working on a Movies on Demand service.

It’s interesting to watch all these hardware companies pushing into content services. Oh, how the world has changed…

[PC Authority]

We don’t have much more information on the MyPocket just yet – we know it can handle up to 7.2Mbps signals, and the GSM bands used (850 and 1900MHz) mean it could hit either AT&T or T-Mobile. The FCC is one of the last stops to full-on production, so we should be seeing more of it pretty soon. [FCC via Engadget]

If the DIR-632’s eight ports seem like overkill, there’s the D-Link Rush (DAP-1560), the Touch (DAP-865), and a new 802.11n pocket router that has no epithet.

The Rush is a secure, powerful access point designed to beef up your current home network for bandwidth intensive content, like HD movies. The Touch, as its name suggests, has a 3-inch touch screen for, you know, changing all those settings you change on your router. The pocket router can function as its own router or as an access point, extending an existing network.

The new routers will be available in the first half of 2010, and prices will be announced at launch. In the case of the DIR-632, that gives you just a few months to secure your LAN party RSVPs. [

Also, we’ve got a full list of all the formats and codecs it supports, which are the same as the software running on any other computer – so yeah, MKV, Dvix, the works. We still have to wait to see what “under $US200″ means exactly – though given how crowded the media streaming box field is, lower would be better.

D-LINK DEBUTS BOXEE BOX AT CES 2010, DIRECTLY LINKING INTERNET ENTERTAINMENT SERVICES TO TVS EVERYWHERE

Networking pioneer and popular entertainment software
create the best way to get the free entertainment the Internet has to offer with no monthly fee

LAS VEGAS, Booth 36232, South Hall, LVCC, Jan. 5, 2010 – D-Link made lots of geeks and early adopters happy today by introducing the revolutionary Boxee Box by D-Link, winner of the CES Best of Innovations award in the Home Entertainment category.

The Boxee Box by D-Link reinterprets what TV should be. The Boxee Box delivers movies, TV shows, music, and photos from a user’s computer, home network, and the Internet to their HDTV with no PC needed. Additionally, Boxee’s core social features make it easy for friends to discover new content from each other through social networks like Facebook, Twitter, and more.

Internet Entertainment
Boxee is a popular PC, Mac, and Linux software program that lets users watch hundreds of thousands of popular TV shows and movies. Instead of sifting through millions of confusing Web sites, when users search on Boxee, TV shows and movies are delivered to them with the click of a remote control. Nearly a million Internet users around the world have already downloaded Boxee to enjoy their online entertainment.

The Boxee Box by D-Link takes the same popular software and offers it up as a great device — the perfect companion to a high definition TV. The Boxee Box by D-Link provides access to more than just traditional TV content. It includes a huge library that spans the Internet, such as university courses, panel discussions, academic lectures, presentations, web-only videos and more from TED, Stanford, FORA.tv, Kid Mango, Next New Networks and others. Boxee also makes it easy for users to add their own favourite entertainment sources with simple RSS or XML feeds available for most online video.

In addition to video content, Boxee users can access great music from sites like Pandora, last.fm, shoutcast, and We are Hunted as well as stunning photos from sites like flickr, Picasa and Facebook.

Personal Entertainment
For entertainment lovers who have built their own collections of digital media stored on their computer hard drive or home network, Boxee automatically identifies their content and downloads relevant cover art, synopses, reviews, subtitles, lyrics and more. This feature turns boring files and folders into beautiful media libraries that make it simple and appealing to navigate a collection of favourite movies, TV shows, and playlists with a simple remote. Furthermore, the Boxee Box by D-Link has extensive format support (see below) which ensures that when users hit the play button, they get instant gratification, with no need to download codecs or drivers. Also, with built-in 802.11n Wi-Fi support, it can transfer files without delay and from longer distances within a user’s home.

Social Features
The Boxee Box by D-Link keeps people connected with social features to help users discover new content from friends, experts, and tastemakers.

The first step to discovery is sharing, and Boxee makes this easy by letting people recommend any playing content to friends. Additionally Boxee automatically uses recommendations from a user’s Twitter and Facebook friends so they can find new content and instantly enjoy it on the big screen. Since anyone can build on top of Boxee’s open App platform, users can craft their own truly custom experience by creating or downloading plug-ins, add-ons, games, and more.

“We are pleased to partner with Boxee and to be the first with such a ground-breaking device,” said Nick Tidd, vice president of sales of D-Link Pan America and vice president of marketing for D-Link North America. “This powerful device with its unique form factor truly leverages Boxee’s service and is the best way for consumers to quickly access the growing volume of Internet content, organize it and stream it to their TVs and home entertainment centres.”

“D-Link’s successful track record in bringing to market, award-winning digital home networking products, and its global marketing, distribution and channel sales capabilities made them a great fit for our first hardware vendor.” stated Andrew Kippen, vice president of marketing for Boxee, “The Boxee Box by D-Link gives consumers what they want – an easy way to watch Internet or personal entertainment in their living rooms with a simple set-top box that costs under $US200 and has no monthly fees.”

The Boxee Box by D-Link is scheduled to ship in the first half of 2010 through the company’s vast network of retail and e-tail outlets, and at D-Link’s online store, www.dlinkshop.com.
Supported Codecs & Formats
Boxee can be used to play/view practically all common multimedia formats, including:

VIDEO:
Adobe Flash 10.1
H.264  (MKV, MOV)
VC-1
WMV
MPEG-1
MPEG-2
MPEG-4
AVI
Xvid
Divx  
PCM/LPCM
VOB

AUDIO:
MP3
WMA
WAV
AIFF
FLAC
AAC
DTS
Dolby Digital
Ogg Vorbis

PHOTO:
JPEG
TIFF
BMP
PNG

[D-Link]

In other news! The Boxee Box is otherwise exactly was we know it to be, and it’s still on track for a “H1 2010″ release. Spec porn, albeit a bit rehashed:

Networking Pioneer and Popular Entertainment Software Create the Best Way to Get the Free Entertainment the Internet Has to Offer With No Monthly Fee
LAS VEGAS, NV—(Marketwire – January 5, 2010) – CES, Booth 36232, South Hall, LVCC — D-Link made lots of geeks and early adopters happy today by introducing the revolutionary Boxee Box by D-Link, winner of the CES Best of Innovations award in the Home Entertainment category.
The Boxee Box by D-Link reinterprets what TV should be. The Boxee Box delivers movies, TV shows, music, and photos from a user’s computer, home network, and the Internet to their HDTV with no PC needed. Additionally, Boxee’s core social features make it easy for friends to discover new content from each other through social networks like Facebook, Twitter, and more.
Internet Entertainment
Boxee is a popular PC, Mac, and Linux software program that lets users watch hundreds of thousands of popular TV shows and movies. Instead of sifting through millions of confusing Web sites, when users search on Boxee, TV shows and movies are delivered to them with the click of a remote control. Nearly a million Internet users around the world have already downloaded Boxee to enjoy their online entertainment.
The Boxee Box by D-Link takes the same popular software and offers it up as a great device — the perfect companion to a high definition TV. The Boxee Box by D-Link provides access to more than just traditional TV content. It includes a huge library that spans the Internet, such as university courses, panel discussions, academic lectures, presentations, web-only videos and more from TED, Stanford, FORA.tv, Kid Mango, Next New Networks and others. Boxee also makes it easy for users to add their own favourite entertainment sources with simple RSS or XML feeds available for most online video.
In addition to video content, Boxee users can access great music from sites like Pandora, last.fm, shoutcast, and We are Hunted as well as stunning photos from sites like flickr, Picasa and Facebook.
Personal Entertainment
For entertainment lovers who have built their own collections of digital media stored on their computer hard drive or home network, Boxee automatically identifies their content and downloads relevant cover art, synopses, reviews, subtitles, lyrics and more. This feature turns boring files and folders into beautiful media libraries that make it simple and appealing to navigate a collection of favourite movies, TV shows, and playlists with a simple remote. Furthermore, the Boxee Box by D-Link has extensive format support (see below) which ensures that when users hit the play button, they get instant gratification, with no need to download codecs or drivers. Also, with built-in 802.11n Wi-Fi support, it can transfer files without delay and from longer distances within a user’s home.
Social Features
The Boxee Box by D-Link keeps people connected with social features to help users discover new content from friends, experts, and tastemakers. The first step to discovery is sharing, and Boxee makes this easy by letting people recommend any playing content to friends. Additionally, Boxee automatically uses recommendations from a user’s Twitter and Facebook friends so they can find new content and instantly enjoy it on the big screen. Since anyone can build on top of Boxee’s open App platform, users can craft their own truly custom experience by creating or downloading plug-ins, add-ons, games, and more.
“We are pleased to partner with Boxee and to be the first with such a ground-breaking device,” said Nick Tidd, vice president of sales for D-Link Pan America and vice president of marketing for D-Link North America. “This powerful device with its unique form factor truly leverages Boxee’s service and is the best way for consumers to quickly access the growing volume of Internet content, organize it and stream it to their TVs and home entertainment centres.”
“D-Link’s successful track record in bringing to market, award-winning digital home networking products, and its global marketing, distribution and channel sales capabilities made them a great fit for our first hardware vendor,” stated Andrew Kippen, vice president of marketing for Boxee. “The Boxee Box by D-Link gives consumers what they want — an easy way to watch Internet or personal entertainment in their living rooms with a simple set-top box that costs under $US200 and has no monthly fees.”
The Boxee Box by D-Link is scheduled to ship in the first half of 2010 through the company’s vast network of retail and e-tail outlets, and at D-Link’s online store, www.dlinkshop.com.
Supported Codecs & Formats
Boxee can be used to play/view practically all common multimedia formats, including:
VIDEO:
Adobe Flash 10.1
H.264 (MKV, MOV)
VC-1
WMV
MPEG-1
MPEG-2
MPEG-4
AVI
Xvid
Divx
PCM/LPCM
VOB

AUDIO:
MP3
WMA
WAV
AIFF
FLAC
AAC
DTS
Dolby Digital
Ogg Vorbis

PHOTO:
JPEG
TIFF
BMP
PNG

[D-Link]

The Price: $US230 or so on Google Shopping

The Verdict: Very interesting and very promising. It’s more expensive than a standard router, but the fact that it does have a small photo frame (it’s only 3.2 inches) and space for a 2.5-inch laptop hard drive makes it impressive. All of these features work, but they work in varying degrees.

The Router: D-Link’s not inexperienced at making networking devices, so it’s not surprising that the DIR-685 works quite well as a wireless hub for all your stuff. Wireless range is comparable to an Airport Extreme or a Linksys WRT610N, and reaches all three floors of my house, through various amounts of walls. Speed is also on par with the other two routers and it can wirelessly stream files with little problem to various media players, as we cover below.

The Media Streamer: Again, the engineers at D-Link managed to shove in a bunch of functionality that you wouldn’t expect. You get a BitTorrent downloader, an iTunes server, an FTP server, network file sharing with user management and even a UPnP streamer to video players.

The iTunes server works exactly as you’d imagine, and shoving MP3s onto its hard drive immediately shows the same songs under the shared iTunes library. The video streaming works pretty flawlessly to the Xbox and the PS3, same as if you were streaming from your PC or from a Windows Home Server. Plus, there’s D-Link’s SharePort tech so you can plug in a printer or an external hard drive to the two USB ports, making for even more networkable storage in a relatively small package.

The only problem is that the combination of a hard drive and a fan inside a compact router makes the thing much, much louder than a standard router. It’s probably on par with Xbox 360’s level of ambient noise when the fan is on, which everyone knows is quite distracting when you’re trying to do anything.

The Photo Frame: It is a photo frame, but a 3.2-inch photo frame is like docking your iPhone and calling that a photo frame. But yeah, it is a photo frame and it does run the standard FrameChannel software, which we’re not really fans of.

FrameChannel is an easy way for photo frame makers to add functionality without developing it themselves. It has RSS feeds, news, weather, sports, plus Photosharing sites like Flickr, Facebook, MobileMe, Picasa, Photobucket and smugmug to actually get photos onto your frame. It’s “stable”, for the most part, but it’s nothing pleasurable to use.

The DIR-685’s touch buttons aren’t that responsive either when navigating the frame, so you’re often stuck pressing things multiple times to see if the command’s gone through. But it is as good a photo frame as any other photo frame using FrameChannel.

The Whole Package: With all these different components, you’re bound to get some conflicting parts. The problem we have is that if you want to use this as a photo frame, you’ll want to place this in your living room or your bedroom or kitchen somewhere where you can see it quite often. This clashes with the occasional noise generated by using it as a media streamer, because of the fan and hard drive noise. If you take out the hard drive, the noise goes away.

At $US230, it’s a pretty solid package, giving you three bits of functionality usually found separately. Provided you can place it somewhere out of the way to hide the noise, the DIR-685 is a winner. [DLink]

Three-in-one router provides lots of functionality in a small package

Slightly pricey

The fan/hard drive combination makes for a noisy experience

The thing isn’t exactly lightweight at 600g, but it’s nice and small, and displays 800×480 resolution. Since it’s both driven and powered by USB 2.0, I can’t imagine it’s super fast on the refresh, either, but then again, it probably depends more on what else you have going on. My sense from reading the press release below is that it’s PC only, but so are most of the cool USB-video products out there. No pic yet—and no pricing either—but we’ve put in some requests for more info.

D-LINK INTRODUCES ‘SIDESTAGE™’, A USB-POWERED MONITOR FOR MULTI-TASKING PC USERS

LAS VEGAS, Jan. 6, 2009 – You’ve embraced interactive computing and your desktop proves it. All sorts of cool widgets, gadgets and programs keep you informed in real time.

The problem is, you also need to get some work done. D-Link, the end-to-end network solutions provider for consumers and business, has made it easy to move your desktop to a side monitor, freeing your main monitor for productivity with the introduction of the D-Link® SideStage™.

The Fountain Valley, Calif.-based company is introducing the SideStage, a 7-inch monitor designed for multi-tasking computer users who prefer to have their main screen for viewing Windows applications, and another smaller screen for extending their desktop to display instant messaging, watch videos, conduct video conferencing via webcams, display Yahoo® Widgets™ and Microsoft® Gadgets™, or house common tools from programs such as Adobe® PhotoShop®.

The SideStage is a stylish and compact USB 2.0-powered monitor with a 7-inch liquid crystal display (LCD) screen featuring 800 by 480 resolution with both landscape and portrait modes. Weighing only 1.34 pounds and housed in a sleek black frame, it is 7 inches wide, 4.6 inches tall and only ¾-inch thick.

It will be on display this week at CES 09 in the South Hall Meeting Room S218 of the Las Vegas Convention Centre and by appointment at off-site demo hotel suites.

“This latest addition to our family of digital home solutions is designed to add productivity to PC users while providing a convenient and friendly way to view smaller applications,” according to Steven Joe, president and CEO, D-Link Systems, Inc. “The SideStage solves the problem of needing a bit more screen space, providing quick access to commonly accessed applications hidden behind larger Windows on the desktop.”

The SideStage is compatible with virtually all CRT and flat panel monitors, has standard and wide screen aspect ratios, 32-bit True Colour depth for high-quality images and ultra low power consumption, consistent with the D-Link Green™ initiative.

Price and Availability

Pricing for the SideStage will be announced when the product ships later this year to D-Link’s vast network of retail outlets.

The unit sits upright, showing off digital photos, streaming video and weather on its 3.2-inch LCD while users can share a printer and any other USB devices of choice through its open ports in the back. Those interested in networked storage can squeeze in a 2.5″ hard drive for sharing files over the network or just downloading BitTorrent fun.

We’re not seeing a price or release date yet, but if it only had a screen the size of its case, we’d be sitting in a cold puddle of drool.

This isn’t a print server situation, or a network-attached storage thing either, from what we can tell. Technically, D-Link didn’t say a whole lot, except:

SharePort turns the local USB port located on the back of the 802.11n family of Wi-Fi routers into a fast and responsive virtual port so users can access a range of USB devices, by utilizing a new technology of USB over TCP/IP.

Models that can be upgraded include D-Link Xtreme N Gigabit Routers DIR-655, DIR-825, DIR-855 and DGL-4500 Gaming Router, plus the RangeBooster N DIR-628. We’ll try to run a test of this soon, but if you beat us to it, tell us about your experience.

Press Release for DIR-825 Router

D-LINK NOW SHIPPING COST-EFFECTIVE DUAL BAND 802.11n Wi-Fi ROUTER WITH SharePort(tm) TECHNOLOGY

FOUNTAIN VALLEY, Calif., Oct. 1, 2008 – D-Link, the end-to-end provider of network solutions for consumers and business, today began shipping an Xtreme N(tm) Dual Band Gigabit Router for the home or small office, featuring dual band access that simultaneously creates two networks to provide superior clarity, faster Wi-Fi and wired gigabit speeds and HD Fuel(tm) enhanced Quality of Service (QoS).

The D-Link(r) DIR-825 also features SharePort(tm) technology that allows users to share USB devices such as printers, multi-function printers (MFP) and storage drives with other computers on the network — in either a wired or wireless environment.

SharePort turns the local USB port located on the back of the DIR-825 router into a fast and responsive virtual network port so users can access a range of USB devices regardless of their location in the home or office. With the power of 802.11n Wi-Fi technology, D-Link’s latest addition to its Xtreme N wireless family allows the user to check email and browse the Internet on the 2.4GHz band while simultaneously streaming high-definition (HD) movies and other media on the 5GHz band, making it ideal for online gaming applications on the PC and gaming consoles such as PS3(r), Xbox 360(r) and the Nintendo Wii(r).

The latest offering in the D-Link Green(tm) family of routers, the DIR-825 integrates D-Link Green Ethernet(tm) technology that uses an innovative, energy-saving feature that automatically detects link status and network cable length, then adjusts power accordingly. D-Link routers also feature Wi-Fi scheduling that allows customers to easily program when the Wi-Fi radio signals are turned on and off to further save energy consumption.

With the router’s powerful new HD Fuel technology users can enjoy the clarity of the 5GHz wireless band while benefiting from intelligent quality of service ideally suited for streaming HD media and for other bandwidth-intensive applications such as online gaming applications.

HD Fuel takes wired and wireless data traffic, categorizes and separates it into multiple data streams and assigns priorities – Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP), video streaming and online gaming are given priority over Web browsing, for instance. The dual band capability helps to enhance speed even more by using the 2.4GHz band for regular computer applications and the 5GHz band for larger, more intense data transfer.

“By expanding our Xtreme N wireless router product line, we are further meeting the consumer’s need for full Wi-Fi network functionality and reliability for powering their digital home at prices they can afford,” according to Steven Joe, president and CEO, D-Link Systems, Inc. in Fountain Valley, Calif.

Key Features and Benefits
? Xtreme N technology for farther home or office coverage
? Support for advanced WPA and WPA2 encryption, advanced firewall and
parental controls for maximum security
? D-Link’s Quick Router Setup Wizard for easy installation and online access
? Good Neighbour Policy support to prevent interference with other wireless
networks
? Backward compatibility with 802.11g, 11b and 11a devices, including game
consoles and digital media players.
? Compliance with D-Link’s ongoing Green initiatives to promote energy
conservation and environmental protection
? 24/7 basic installation support
? One year limited warranty

Price and Availability
The DIR-825 will be widely available Oct. 1, 2008 through D-Link’s network of retail, etail and solution providers, and online at www.dlinkshop.com for the manufacturer’s suggested retail price (MSRP) of $199.99. SharePort also will be available in D-Link’s family of high-end 802.11n routers, including the DIR-628, DIR-655, DIR-855 and DGL-4500**. Current owners of those routers will be able to upgrade to SharePort technology by downloading the firmware and client utility from the D-Link website, www.dlink.com.