Gadgets → Feedback on a media digital frame

Hi Guys,

i wanted to get some feedback from you all.

I've started to create a "media frame" and wanted to get your thoughts on functionality/features.

Basically it is a 14" LCD screen housed in a wooden picture frame which will have the following functions:
1. Display photos which are linked to your personal picasa account (i.e. just like a digital picture frame). Any picture you take from any device and upload to picasa will be shown on your "media frame" at home.
2. Show the weather in full screen during the morning hours from 6am-8am (configurable timing) - includes high/low, as well as graph of todays forecast. Idea is that when you wake up you can see that.
3. Show the top-3 news headlines from new.google.com in a category of your choice from 6am-8am (cycle through with the weather).
4. Well defined structure so that people can extend it and show whatever information they want when they want.

Firstly, what do you think about this product? Do you think it is useful? If not, what would make it useful?

Appreciate your feedback.

Pub

Sounds like the product I've been looking for. The problem with most of the picture frames on the market is that they all pull pictures from an SD card. Now this is great, but ideally I'd like a picture frame that you could give to grandparents, friends, and other family members and have it pull pictures from the Internet. Of course these individuals would need an Internet connection, but most of them now-a-days do. And if they don't the picture frame would still have an SD card slot so you could just send them a new SD card.

The idea of pulling pictures from picasa sounds great. But you should also give the option of having an FTP site, as many of us are more advanced and might want to upload the photos to an FTP site. Also, for picasa, you should allow the pictures to only be pulled from a specific album, such as "PhotoFramePics", so that the end user only receives specific photos.

Another feature would be that the pictureframe's configuration screen can be accessed remotely (like a router is). This would be a BIG plus when you are giving the picture frame to family members who aren't very technical. So if you need to change the picasa location, or other settings, you can do it remotely.

The weather and news screen sounds like an great add-on, not sure if I would use it or not to be honest since I use my phone and TV.

14" sounds too big for me. I think 12" is still the sweet spot.

Price wise? $80 - $100.

Here's one that I've had my eye on:

»www.amazon.com/Pix-Star- ··· re+frame

A few issues with this:

1) The price

2) It comes with a free e-mail address, but how do we know the company will stay around? I don't like this option.

The weather thing sounds cool. Also maybe an alternating time of day display and weather and pictures in a shuffle mode. Say a 5 or 10 second cycle.

Also would be nice to have access to a news ticker and/or stock ticker in there.

Then again what would really top it off is to add a USB Host port so it could accept a thumb drive and play all the popular codecs, from divx and mp4 to mkv and audio formats as well.

Then it really would be a swiss army knife of media frames.

I'd shell out $100 for a device like that in a heartbeat.

thanks for the feedback Rob and the ideas. Yes way ahead of you regarding picasa specific albums

Also regarding configuration screen, I was thinking the same to have a separate web URL - configuration through a USB cable of some sort is very cumbersome.

The idea behind the weather is that it will be automatically there for you right before you leave the house in the morning.

are there other pieces of information that would be useful?