Normally I’d say digital photo frame, splidgital photo frame…but iGala’s one has a couple of features that make it stand out. It’s an 8-inch touchscreen, with standard 4:3 ratio 800 x 600 pixels so you get less irritating crops or letterboxing, plus its wireless and has 1GB of internal memory. But it’s actually got its own Gmail address so you can email photos to it directly from anywhere. Plus you don’t even need a PC to set it up: it has its own interface. Neat stuff, for a not-too expensive $US239. [Digitalpictureframereview]
This is a 21st Century Christmas tree bauble: There’s a 1.4-inch screen in there, powered by AAA batteries and 8MB of USB-accessed storage, and it’s capable of showing slideshows of your pictures. Out now for around $US12 each. Which is cheap enough that you could have a bunch of them on the tree, among the innocent tinsel and candy canes, set to display the kind of photos that’d really freak out the mother-in-law when she visits. [Chinavision via 7Gadgets]
Sanyo knows that some of us are still upset that the futuristic fictional universe of The Jetsons doesn’t look like it’ll come to pass, so they’ve thrown us a bone: a Wi-Fi digital picture frame that looks like it came straight out of Jane Jetson’s foyer. The innards are pretty unexciting , with Windows CE and 256MB of onboard memory to complement a fairly standard set of picture frame capabilities, including a wide range of storage support, Picasa downloads and limited audio playback. The frame more than makes up for being a technological bore by looking completely amazing, in a retro-futurist kind of way.
The Cameo is T-Mobile’s $US100 digital picture frame that’s loaded with a GSM mobile phone tech. Users, who are willing to fork over $US10 a month for a subscription, will be able to snap shots on their phones and have the pictures automagically beamed to their Cameo. For those who ditch out on the subscription, the Cameo is still a standard digital picture frame, running at 720 x 480 and supporting various flash cards and mini USB storage. So is it practical? We’ll let you decide. [CellPhone Signal]
It’s not revolutionary tech, but this Motorola picture frame concept combines a few different fields to create a pretty practical device. The device looks like a digital picture frame, but it also supports VOIP and acts as a wireless information hotspot with femtocell integration (cellular base station that can cover wireless formats from GSM to WiMAX). With a few UI tweaks, we’d gladly hang one on our wall. [via Crave]
I have to hand it to the guys at Motorola for coming up with the idea to integrate a femtocell and a VoIP soft phone into a digital photo frame. Femotcells help cover weak spots in a cellular network by sending calls over the internet—which is a good idea except that it would involve yet another device cluttering up your workspace. The choice of a frame as the focal point for the system is a clever solution to this problem because it already utilises a touchscreen and it blends in well with the surrounding environment. Femtocells have yet to make a big impact on our wireless networks, but I can see devices like this helping to speed up adoption. [connectedhome2go via ZatzNotFunny]
This 32-inch Wi-Fi picture frame may look like a TV, but as your guests will quickly (sadly) discover, it’s just a frame to show off your family photos. Easily paired to a wireless router, the display is compatible with Windows Live Photo Gallery as well as proprietary image software that can wirelessly copy photos from your computer to an inserted SD, MS or Compact Flash card. And while the (1,366×768) Smartpants SP3200WF can display PowerPoint, RSS and PDFs, it seems to miss the more tempting media extender and Hulu opportunities. No word on price or availability. [via Luxury Launches]
While OLEDs are still a little too small to be used as full fledged television sets, there’s at least one job where the high-resolution, vividly coloured screens function incomparably–as high end digital picture frames! Kodak’s new ultra-thin 7.6-inch OLED Wireless panel boasts a 16:9 aspect ratio, 800×480 resolution, and a white to black contrast ratio of 30,000:1.
OK, OK…so it’s another damn digital photo frame, but bear with me. Equipped with a 3.5-inch, 320×240 display, it may not do anything that the average frame doesn’t, yet it’s appealing to the eye. It’s simple design is appropriate for its overall lack of complexity — it has a USB 2.0 port, MP3 support, a single SD card slot, internal memory that accepts up to 45 JPEG photos and a few navigation buttons. Plus its small and thin and doubles as a clock/calendar on the go.
Sending another (admittedly pretty) digital picture frame into an already overcrowded, under-innovated field, Sony has announced is US$300 Vaio CP1, which boasts wireless networking, RSS feed integration and – most interestingly – Shoutcast radio streaming. The picture display capabilities are also above average, as the frame can show photos directly from its 128MB of internal storage, a wide variety of common media cards or even Picasa albums stored online.
