What About WiFi?

Since the beginning of the year, many new digital picture frames have been announced from companies too numerous to keep track of. Some major names — including Toshiba and Samsung — have entered the market. One commonality of I’ve noticed among many of these new frames, though, is that almost none of them offer built-in WiFi.

Perhaps not surprisingly, at WirelessPictureFrame.com, we believe that WiFi is going to be the foundation upon which the success of the digital picture frame industry is built. So, seeing so many new frames without WiFi has led me to wonder recently, what about WiFi?

In just the past two weeks, there have been two pretty high-profile digital frame announcements, one from Toshiba, the other from PanDigital.

Toshiba’s announcement of its Tekbright frame launched the company into this space. Yet, despite coming into the market years after many of its competitors, the Tekbright frame offers basically the same set of features as many other frames: good resolution, support for removable media cards, some built-in memory.

PanDigital’s new slate of products does feature network options —both WiFi and Bluetooth. Neither option is built into the frames, though. Instead, both are offered as adapters purchased separately from a frame.

What’s making me curious is why frame manufacturers aren’t using WiFi as a selling feature? Especially since WiFi is likely to be the feature that unlocks the true value of digital picture frames.

One argument could be that the cost of adding WiFi to frames would push them out of impulse-buy territory. Perhaps. Frame makers need to maintain their margins to keep growing, of course, but I wonder how much additional cost included WiFi would require. Remember that DIY digital frame article at Popular Science we linked to a few weeks ago? That guy added wireless to his frame using an off-the-shelf WiFi card that cost $30 retail.

I’d expect that manufacturers buying in bulk could get better pricing than that. But for the sake of argument, let’s assume that $30 is the increase in cost that a wireless frame requires. Is a $30 price difference for more features a make-or-break change on a frame that already costs $120-$200? I’d expected that most people would be willing to shell out a little extra for Internet connectivity, but I don’t know. Perhaps frame makers have research indicating that the increased cost would mean decreased sales.

Another possible explanation for the lack of WiFi, and the one I put more stock in right now, is the support overhead WiFi could create. I haven’t yet used a wireless frame whose setup process was completely simple. I’m pretty technologically savvy, so I can imagine what kind of challenge it might be for a lay user. A frustrating user experience at set up, and during the life of the frame, would lead to two things that frame makers don’t want: negative perceptions from customers and increased tech-support costs.

If WiFi is hard to set up or maintain, customers are going to be frustrated, which is always bad for sales. On top of that, they’re likely to place more calls to tech support, making that area of the business more costly, which isn’t great either.

Whatever the reason (and if there are other reasons that I haven’t considered, I’d love to hear from readers on them), without WiFi, the advances introduced in these new frames are incremental. With WiFi, they advances are much bigger – turning the frame into a net-connected device that can do much, much more than just show pictures from your digital camera.

The leaps and bounds that this market should grow by seem most likely to come from a really compelling product. I’d wager that that product — whether it’s here already or has yet to be released — is going to have WiFi built in. We’ve got a few months before the holiday shopping season arrives, so new products will still come along. I hope more of these products have built-in WiFi.

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