Last week I decided to order a digital picture frame, after looking around a bit I decided on the SPF-72V from Samsung, I have become a huge Samsung fan over the last few years, all of my TVs are Samsung now and they look great!
This is my first digital picture frame so I did not quite know what to expect, I wanted to find a unit that did not look like a peice of technology but picture quality and WiFi was were my priorities (hence the Samsung); with that being said the unit arrived today and I have to say I am a bit disappointed, my top 5 nits are:
-
The LCD has two lines of dead pixels, on the right side a few cm from each other; I expected better quality control from Samsung but it could just be my Irish luck
-
The unit does not appear to support support WPA2, WPA-AES or WPA-AUTO at-all.
-
I was unable to get the device to connect to my secured wireless network, I had been using WPA2-AES, and I progressively stepped down to no security/encryption (AES->TKIP, WPA2->WPA) and then I was able to get the device to connect. I did not try WEP because its so insecure, the only thing more I could try above what I already did was using a shorter secret (mine is 20+ characters) but on principle I did not.
-
The device supports photos, videos and music however it turns out that the only content it can get from the PC (via WMC) is Photos, that's right Music and Videos is expected to be on a memory card!
-
There is this potentially cool feature to use
RSS feeds and Windows Live as a source for pictures however I cant find any live spaces with photos I care about and the photo
RSS feeds I can find and
care about don't appear to be supported to make things worse I cant find any documentation on how it expects these
RSS feeds to be
laid for this feature to work, if I had this information I cold use proxy
URLs and
build XLST to make it look right.
The hardware is put together well, although its thicker than I would have expected; I should also note that I think LCD has a nicer picture than the Kodak EX-811 I saw at Sears the other day.
When using the device I asked myself what would I like to see changed in a device like this, the following came to mind:
-
Touch Screen and
Haptic Feedback Support - Since the device does not have a battery and one needs to interact with the device a fair amount to select what you want displayed you end up holding the device allot, the navigation buttons are on the right and are a bit awkward to use it would be much better to be able interact with the device with via the screen directly.
-
Sideshow support - It would be great if this was was
Sideshow enabled, there would be allot more utility in the device if it did.
-
Include better defaults - Right now the device did not come with any pictures, even VISTA includes a few pictures and video out of the box, it did not include any sample RSS feeds with content, it also pointed at a proxy server that no one would ever be able to reach, though it was disabled.
I ended up getting this device for what is supposedly a great price ($50 less than the best price of froogle.com /w free shipping) but I have to say I am not impressed.
I think I will be returning this one and giving the Momento a try, it has Sideshow support, maybe it has a better chance of winning my heart.
I think these devices have the potential to become common place but this was so difficult to get going its certainly limited to us "geeks" right now and for that kind of ubiquity to happen that would certainly need to change.
[Update 10/05/07 12:18PM] Last night I received the iMate Momento 100 (see: Returned my Samsung Picture Frame and Ordered a iMate Momento 100...) I had ordered, I set it up and ran into the same problems I mentioned in this review this time I put my pride aside and set the password to a smaller value (11 chars) and it worked; its a nice frame I will post my thoughts about this unit this weekend. I suspect that the issue here is really a limitation of the underlying Windows CE wireless suplicant (hence the shared behavior).