One of our first few posts on Hi Tech Taipei was about wireless digital photo frames that could connect to the internet. Well it seems these products have indeed arrived and Small Business Computing reviews the D-Link frame. Small Business Computing says:
Digital picture frames—LCD panels that sit upright on a table or shelf, or hang on the wall to display images—are a cool idea, and they’ve suddenly become a hot consumer item. But most are a pain to use.
They rarely have enough onboard memory to hold a reasonable selection of photos and the only way you can add pictures is by inserting a camera card or, in some cases, plugging in a USB drive. Most are also pretty much single-application devices: displaying locally stored images is all they can do.
D-Link is trying to change that. Its DSM-210 Wireless Internet Photo Frame ($290) connects to a home (or office) Wi-Fi network and lets you pull images from computers on the network. It connects to the Internet, as well, to pull images and information from the Web, including from photo sharing and social media sites, such as Flickr, Picasa and Facebook.
You can also control the DSM-210, in limited ways, over the network from a PC using a Yahoo widget developed by D-Link for the purpose. The DSM-210 is not perfect, but it’s a creditable first foray into a new product category for D-Link. The wireless and Internet features make it a big improvement on most other digital frames out there.
That said, D-Link was not the first with a Wi-Fi picture frame. Kodak introduced wireless frames two years ago, though without the Internet functionality. And there are others available now as well. The wonder is that manufacturers don’t include Wi-Fi on all or at least more of their products. It makes the device so much more useful and convenient.
D-Link originally unveiled the DSM-210 in January, but then went back to the drawing board to refine the product. It’s finally available now for $290 from the company’s Web site.
Well its nice to see these products are rolling out. I must say I do agree with the author. My digital photo frame has NO memory and requires an external memory device to be plugged in and kept in the frame to show the pictures. Yes, we have one of the older ones. Extending the capabilities of the photo frame to access the internet provides incredible convenience to end users. I suppose the inhibiting feature for including wireless internet on each frame might be the cost of the wireless chip and/or design and development costs. That said, I am not sure if these are the real reasons. I will probably now wait for the 3rd or 4th generation of wireless internet frames before making my next purchase. Let them iron out the problems first.
Small Business Computing: D-Link Wireless Internet Photo Frame
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