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Last updated: Tuesday, July 7, 2009

Even before someone coined the term “mash-up,” mash-ups were popular in the technology world. Some are made in heaven, and are now standard pairings: clock + radio, refrigerator + freezer, cell phone + camera. Others are still on the early-adopter fringe: TV + Internet, camera + Internet, refrigerator + Internet. This month, D-Link, the networking-equipment company, will offer a mash-up that nobody has ever tried before: wireless router + home backup hard drive + digital picture frame. That, in a nutshell, is the D-Link DIR-685 ($300 list price), which is being offered in the United States but not yet elsewhere. The 685’s heart is in the right place. Its inventors have noticed that our high-tech homes are becoming cluttered with network-related gadgets and their associated cable creep. As long as people are going to buy all these different network gadgets, D-Link figures, why not combine them into one? It’s the right idea. Unfortunately, D-Link is the wrong company to make it a reality. First, the good news: Once you get the 685 set up, it works very well indeed. It broadcasts your Internet connection wirelessly — a fast, strong Wi-Fi signal (802.11n). This single router turned my entire house into a Wi-Fi hot spot, thanks to its ability to blast through floors and walls. I was even getting three bars of signal out of four all the way upstairs. Every conceivable home-router feature is on this machine’s configuration screens: port forwarding, application rules, individual Web-site blocking, a sophisticated firewall, UPnP, multicast streams, wake on LAN, users and groups, network access lists, scheduled lockouts, logs, security formats like WPA and WEP, remote management and much, much more. (And no, I’m not going to define those. If you are among the geeks whom D-Link is apparently aiming at with this router, you know perfectly well what those…

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