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Motorola 10″ Wireless Digital Picture Frame

Motorola’s beautiful 10-inch wireless digital picture frame will make any room in your house a focal point!

Friends and family, as well as you, can e-amil photos directly to your Motorola frame; it has its own email address! You can also subscribe to various RSS feeds that will appear on your wireless frame, such as local and national news, weather, and sports.

You can even listen to the radio over your Motorola wireless picture frame!

With a screen resolution of 800 x 600, you know your pictures will appear bright and colorful.

An internal memory of 512 mb means you’ll be able to store up to 2300 digital pictures; that’s a lot of pictures, folks.

Your Motorola wireless digital photo frame also accepts SD, SDHC, MMC memory cards and USB flash drives. It’s compatible with Windows 2000 and higher.

Did I mention that it is also an Mp3 player, a calendar, and an alarm clock? Wow!

The holidays are fast approaching; don’t you think the people on your list ought to have a wireless digital picture frame?

Updates From FrameChannel!

It’s been awhile since our last update. In the past few months there have been lots of updates and new channels added to FrameChannel.

Updates

Now Playing – Ever see a headline on your screen and want to read the whole article? Now, if you sign into your FrameChannel account and click on the Now Playing tab, you can will see a list of your channels that have associated stories. For text based channels such as People, BBC, Time, RSS feeds, etc. you can now click through to the full story on the source’s website!

My Account – We’ve streamlined the registration process and the My Account page. Some of the information that was once in My Account (your account’s RSS address, PIN and device settings) is now located on the settings page. You can access these by clicking on the green Advanced button on the top left.

New channels – We’ve been very busy adding lots of new content! A few of our new channels are listed below. To see them all, go onto FrameChannel and check it out!

• Deutsche Welle – 16 new international news and sports channels

• Lottery – Lottery results for the US and Canada

• Better Homes and Gardens “Better Blog” – Content from the magazine’s popular blog

• Sports headlines – 11 new channels covering major league and college sports

• College Football and Basketball – Scores and standings for US college teams

• Hockey – Scores and standings for NHL teams

• High School Sports (US) – Get your local high school’s sports schedule and results

• Entertainment Weekly – Get EW’s daily picks for music, TV, movies, and more

• Facebook® Birthdays – Never miss a friend’s birthday again with birthday updates

• Memeo Share – Share your photos from Memeo

• Digg – View the daily Diggs in 8 categories, from business Diggs, to Gaming Diggs and much more

• US House of Representatives – Search for your local representative and subscribe to their Twitter feed. Don’t know your Rep? Choose the Local category then the US House of Representatives sub category and browse through the listings!

WIth all these changes and additions, we’re sure some of you will have questions and feedback. We want to know what you think! Contact us via our helpdesk with any questions or comments!

Follow us on twitter! We add a new channel everyday that we announce on Twitter. Come check it out to know when we add new channels!

Thank you for using FrameChannel!

Sincerely,

The FrameChannel team

DreamScreen VS. Toshiba: FrameChannel Wins!

David Pogue, of the New York Times, has written an article comparing HP’s DreamScreen with Toshiba’s DMF82XKU and DMF102XKU. Guess which one comes out smelling like a rose?

. . . a case study of two companies’ approaches to the same problem.

In this corner, the DreamScreen from Hewlett-Packard. It’s available in 10- and 13-inch versions for $250 and $300. In that corner, Toshiba’s less attractively named DMF82XKU (8 inches, $180) and DMF102XKU (10 inches, $230). Each can play music, display photos and present widgets — radio, scores, headlines and other Web goodies — wirelessly grabbed from the Internet.

Both are sleek wide-screen displays with a one-inch margin of glossy black; the Toshiba, with its fine transparent acrylic border, looks slightly classier. Each comes with a tiny, cheap plastic remote control whose buttons require considerable force, but you can also summon hidden illuminated touch controls by tapping on either frame. They come in handy when you lose the remote.

Each frame is meant to sit on a desk, but the H.P. can also hang on a wall.

You can load up either frame with photos, videos and unprotected music files by inserting a memory card, a U.S.B. flash drive or a U.S.B. cable connected to a Mac or PC.

Photos look terrific; both frames easily fulfill the primary mission of a digital photo frame, gracefully changing the image once every few seconds, every few hours or every day. (You can even rotate the Toshiba 90 degrees; the image rotates to match.)

But that’s where the similarities end.

Toshiba’s frame lets you subscribe to any of 1,000 widgets at Framechannel.com. It’s a fantastic variety: BBC. Facebook updates. Twitter posts. Favorite sports teams. Concert info. Cartoons. Trivia. Horoscopes. Local traffic. Channel after channel of gorgeous photography. Both the Toshiba frame and the Framechannel.com site, where you load it up, are challenging to figure out. (Incidentally, many other companies sell Framechannel-enabled frames, but the new Toshiba is a good representative of the genre.)

The Toshiba’s software design over all, in fact, is somewhat baffling. It consists of simple lists of text commands, but at least it’s quick and efficient.

The DreamScreen from H.P., on the other hand, has a lush, colorful, icon-driven software design. The company thinks it’s really onto something; a public relations person calls it “a breakthrough new platform.”

Well, that might be pushing it.

The widgets are far more limited than the Toshiba’s; each represents an individual deal made by H.P. (as opposed to Framechannel’s public-bazaar approach). They include Clock, Facebook, Weather and, for Web photos, Snapfish. (Snapfish? Not Flickr?) You can’t add any new ones, although H.P. says that it will, through software updates.

Some of them are handy — especially the Pandora radio widget, which tailors its music selections according to your tastes (you rate each song as it plays). The clock options are beautiful: analog or digital, clock with photo, clock with calendar, clock with foreign-city time and so on.

Others are less impressive. The Calendar, for example, shows a handsome month-view — with nothing on it, and no way to add anything to it. Guess it’s useful if you want to know what day of the week the 23rd falls on.

The speakers are stereo and sound better and richer than the Toshiba’s. The H.P. has a slot on top for the remote; the Toshiba does not. There’s a jack for a wired network, which the Toshiba lacks.

Unfortunately, in terms of polish and design finesse, the DreamScreen might better be called the NightmareScreen.

Over and over again, the software gets in your way. You can’t hear the different alarm sounds as you scroll through them. There’s no indication on the frame that the alarm has been set. The audio and video get out of sync during the frame’s tutorial videos.

On options screens, like the one where you set up your clock, the settings appear in a tall column. If you want to adjust only one of them — Clock Style, the first option — you would think that pressing O.K. on the remote would mean “I’m finished, take me back.” But no. You have to walk all the way down the screen, using the remote’s arrow buttons, past all of the other options, to highlight the O.K. button on the screen, and then press the O.K. button on the remote to “click” that. It’s exhausting.

There’s a dedicated Slideshow button on the remote, so that when a guest drops by, you can get those pictures flowing with one button press, no matter what you’re doing. Unfortunately, it doesn’t work if what you were doing is the Calendar, the Settings screen, the Clock, and certain other random places.

Meanwhile, there’s no Home button. You either have to hit Back-Back-Back, or stumble upon the tip, in the tutorial videos, that pressing-and-holding the Back button takes you Home. H.P. agrees, in retrospect, that a button for the most frequently visited screen might have been useful.

My favorite bug: you can choose Internet radio stations either by nation of origin or by genre. But the two lists have gotten mixed up in the software. So your choices of music genre are Algeria, Alternative, Ambient, American Samoa and so on.

The frame is dog slow, too. Ten seconds to start up the Clock. Eleven seconds to open Settings. Five seconds every time you want to change widgets, which requires going to the Home screen.

(“We’ve learned that we’ve taxed the processor too much,” says the product manager, Ameerd Karim. He says the company is readying a software patch that may help.)

According to the company, those big, bright, elegant onscreen graphics are what bogs the thing down. Frames like the Toshiba, with its straight-ahead, boring all-text menus, don’t have the speed problem.

But in the end, I finally realized what bugged me most about the DreamScreen. You’re standing directly in front of a beautiful glass screen with a Home screen, inch-tall icons, and finger-size buttons — and then you’re supposed to operate it all using a remote six inches away? It just feels wrong.

H.P. won’t confirm or deny it, but I’ll bet a hundred bucks that the DreamScreen was originally intended to have a touch screen. That theory would also explain those bizarre software designs, like having to walk down a screen full of options to reach the O.K. button. In the touch-screen conception, of course, you’d just tap O.K. with your finger, one step instead of seven.

Somewhere along the line — maybe when the economy crashed? — I’ll bet those plans got shelved to keep the price down. But if the DreamScreen truly is a “platform,” as H.P. says, then maybe there’s hope yet for the Touch DreamScreen.

So there it is: a study in contrasts. One frame where almost no thought was put into the software design, resulting in an infinitely flexible, crude but less expensive machine. And another frame where, in fact, the software design was overthought — resulting in a more limited, sluggish machine with glitches.

Maybe someone should get those two sets of designers together for coffee someday. Yeah — coffee and widgets.

Hands On with HP’s DreamScreen

Tom Spring, at PCWorld.com, has posted an article about HP’s new limited-wireless DreamScreen digital picture frames; he’s not entirely convinced, but we’ll let YOU be your own judge of it:

HP is taking the digital photo frame to new heights with its HP DreamScreen line of smart displays that do way more than just let you browse pretty pictures. The DreamScreen, announced Wednesday, is a beautiful smart display that comes in two sizes (10- and 13-inches diagonally). They link wirelessly to the Internet and can display pictures, five-day weather forecasts, Facebook friend updates, and the Pandora music service. The displays also can be linked to your desktop so you can easily put multimedia content directly on them.

Available today online, the HP DreamScreen will run you $250 for the 100 model and $300 for the 130 model. HP says DreamScreens will be in brick-and-mortar retail stores on October 11.

I checked out the HP DreamScreens last night at an industry event in New York and wouldn’t exactly call them a “dream.” The DreamScreen may look like slick tablet computers that people have been salivating for, but these are just very expensive and very smart displays that lack the key features — such as a touch screen interface and true portability — that could make them breakthrough products.

I’ll get into my beefs with DreamScreen after I break down the specs.

A Digital Photo Frame to Die For

The 130 DreamScreen model has a 13.3-inch display that offers a 16:9 ratio and a resolution of 800 by 480. The 100 unit has a 10.2-inch diagonal display. Both units sport 2GB (1.5GB usable space) of memory, have two USB ports, headphone output for external speakers, built-in stereo speakers, ethernet jack, and a 802.11 b/g wireless antenna. Both units have built-in 6-in-2 card readers that can accept CF and SD cards.

The USB port allows you to connect a thumb drive or external hard drive. The DreamScreen can also play videos (MPEG1, MPEG2, MPEG4, H.264) and music (MP3, WMA, AAC, WAV). Software for a PC allows you to add content to the frame.

You navigate the device using a tiny remote control or via controls built into the hardware. Applications include access to HP’s SnapFish online photo service; a custom version of Facebook for viewing friends, status updates, and photos; access to Pandora music streaming service; HP’s own HP SmartRadio service; and a clock.

The DreamScreen some with wall mounts on the back or can be set on a table. It lacks a battery, so it must stay plugged in at all times.

What’s Not to Like?

My biggest beef with the DreamScreen is that you want it to be a touchscreen device — and it’s not. Last night, nearly everyone who looked at the DreamScreen tried to touch the screen to navigate it. The DreamScreens run an embedded version of Linux that lacks the ability to do much more than run pre-canned HP applications specially designed for the devices. Right now, there are only eight applications, though HP representatives say that number could be expanded soon.

I like the idea of having a limited functioning device, but some basic functions are missing. You can’t check e-mail or browse news headlines, for example. I get that HP is not just creating a touchscreen computer with this device; if I wanted one of those, I could plop down $1400 for HP’s TouchSmart IQ800t. However, I still craved an RSS display and simple messaging notification (be it e-mail, SMS text, or IM). Okay, so responding to messages would be an issue on the DreamScreen, but at least you’d know new messages were there.

Also lacking from the DreamScreen is the capability to view Web-based video content from services such as YouTube and Hulu. E-mail, video, and RSS feeds would all be possible without having to embed a full-fledge OS into the device if HP decided to give the DreamScreen a simple browser. It didn’t.

Another missing feature is the capability to stream video and auido files from your PC, which would eliminate the need to run them locally on the DreamScreen. Ideally you’d be able to navigate libraries of content on your desktop PC or NAS device and playback through the DreamScreen. Right now you can’t.

Another temptation with this device is to pick it up as if it were a sleek portable tablet. Want to take that video you’re watching into the kitchen? You can’t do it without unplugging the device. Even if you don’t mind plugging it in everywhere you go, the DreamScreen sports some bulky hardware on its backside, making it less than ideal for porting from room to room. Once you find a home for this unit, it will most likely stay there.

Now, I’m not going to be popular with HP’s Ameer Karim, director of product marketing. On Wednesday night he told me people just don’t want this type of functionality I want from the DreamScreen.

I readily admit I may be suffering from Apple tablet envy, where I think that everything that kind of looks like a tablet should be a table. But the DreamScreen, for me, is stuck in tablet purgatory. It’s not quite the tablet I want it to be and too expensive to justify as a replacement for the digital picture frame I never use.