D-Link Wireless Digital Photo Frame

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

Digital Photo Frames and the Wireless Internet

As a rule I don't usually get overly excited about commercial electronics gadgets. However, I do like digital photo frames. On these I was an early adopter as marketers like to say. As soon as I heard about them and could get my hands on one I did. Digital photo frames were very popular at Computex last year and the projections for the growth of these products were very positive.

At that time I read (I can't remember where) that future digital photo frames would be connected to the internet and that pictures could be pushed onto the storage device remotely. So, for example, if I bought my mother a digital photo frame (and she lives in the UK), I would be able to push images to her frame from Taiwan.

It seems this concept is being taken further. Current thinking seems to be to establish a wireless link between a wireless modem and the digital photo frame. Then, instead of using memory sticks to store images, images can be stored on a photo sharing site like Flickr or Photobucket and pushed to the frame with RSS technology. According to Digitimes:

"Recognizing that photo sharing is one of the main demand drivers of the online digital photo market, digital photo frame vendors such as Ceiva, Ality and Momento have come out with wireless frames that utilize push technology (mostly through RSS) so photos hosted on the Internet can be sent to the frame. The use of push technology is a clever way to expand the digital frame market, as photos can be sent to other people's frames as well (as long as permission is given) so friends and family can share photos with each other."

Now, another company, UGA Digital , is hoping to take this one step further and offer a more advanced service. Digitimes says UGA Digital has developed an API that "allows photos from multiple photo sharing sites or from multiple users to be aggregated and pushed to a single digital photo frame." Digitimes continues:

"However, while the digital photo frame market is growing, the market for receiving pushed content on a digital photo frame is still very small."

I think this market will grow. It will certainly reduce the irritation of having to download your images onto a memory card and then having to upload them onto a photo sharing site. Using this method the photos can be uploaded onto the internet and will automatically be sent to the digital photoframe.

I wont rush out to buy the latest photo frame. I already have mine. But it will be interesting to see how they develop.

(Original Article: Extending the Internet to digital photo frames)