Digital photo frames in a home environment are … well, almost neat. Sure, they can be cool eye catchers in commercial environments but in my aestetic, they still are a wee bit tacky in homes. Maybe i’m just old fashioned, but i think that art is physical, photos are static and monitors sweeping and cross-fading are swooshy (in the bad sense). But most of all, i think they are inconvenient. The way to get photos on the frame is to stick some media onto them. The way to change pictures on them is to stick some other media into them. And the way to change pictures at the grandparents’ places is to remember to stick the new media into the frames when you visit them.
This is also the reason i love the Slickr screen saver, which loops photos from my Flickr contacts on my screen. That is the kind of digital photo frame i can appreciate. Not only because it doubles as the computer display i work on, but most of all because it’s my contacts who put their pictures on it. In real time. Without any extra effort from either them or me. Heck, most of them probably do not even realize that they feed my frame — it’s that easy.
For quite some time, i’ve been waiting for a networked photo frame, that’s nifty, affordable and grandparent-usable. Buy it, config it once (until they change their WLAN, but you’ll be there when that happens anyway) and plug it in. Presto, there be pictures. Sure you can do it by recycling a laptop (or PDA, or why not one of those tablets), but that will with most certainty fail in at least one of the three requirements specifications above.
But i see light in the end of the tunnel. A company called PF Digital has the gadget eStarling TouchConnect, a wireless photo frame with a touch interface. Currently the available update mechanisms are RSS, Flickr, Picasa, Twitter, Facebook, Google Calendar. Oh, and and email. Which just screams to be spammed by Viagra and pr0n ads (now that would be funny, granny). I haven’t read through the photo frame manual yet (yeah, photo frames come with manuals these days) but if you can activate many sources at the same time, we have something of a winner on our hands. One feed per grandchild’s parents in our case. And feeds to the calendars where you want the grandparents to see the grandkids.
The US$200 price tag is approximately twice the price i would want to cough up for a 10″ 800*480 pixel gadget but that’s the Early Adopters’ Tax for you, my friend. In a year from now, at least the specs will have come up. And at least the market has now been opened.
