i-Mate Momento: Connected Photo Frame

I remember back in 1987 at the university, we had a lecture on liquid crystals. Two weak points were mentioned in reference to this technology: first, the LCD displays were monochrome, and second, they were too slow to be used to display motion pictures. Five years later I bought my first color LCD laptop (so called active matrix those days) and it had bright and clear and fast LCD display, violating just about everything I had learned about liquid crystals a few years before. The drawback was the price, something in the range of 10 thousand dollars. And today? We have LCDs everywhere. From watches to mobile phones to digital cameras to MP3 players to computers to TV sets... And now even the photo frames have LCD displays. That is natural... why use paper to print digital photos, when you can upload them directly to a "frame". Or a couple of them. As I write, a typical, decent 7 or 8 inch photo frame costs some 100 dollars. They used to have fairly low resolution (480 horizontal pixels), but now for the same price we can get 800x480 models, and they are quite nice. Most of them have multiple memory card slots, so you can just take a memory card from a camera and pop it in the photo frame and the slide show starts. They also have some internal memory and an USB interface, so the pictures can be uploaded by cable.

i-Mate has recently taken the photo frame concept almost where it should be. The Momento frames (7 and 10 inch models available) have a WiFi radio on board. And that makes a difference. Using the on board WiFi the frame connects to your home WiFi network, and then, via your router can reach out for the World. The WiFi local area connection is handy, as you do not need any cables to upload new pictures. What is more, it can automatically pull the picture libraries you share with the Windows Media Player. And if you have a Windows Vista computer, you can set up the frame as a SideShow display using one of the Vista gadgets. But it really gets interesting when you let the frame connect to one of the Internet cloud services. I-Mate prefers you to go to their momentolive.com service, but with some configuration work you can have it connected to the RSS feed of your Picasa Web Albums. So whenever you post a new picture to your Picasa Web Album, it shows up on the frame, even at the other end of the World... Isn't it a great way of sharing pictures with family and friends?

What we really need now are cameras able to upload photos to Picasa with a press of a button. Over WiFi or 3G. Yes, 3G... the carriers would be ecstatic about the prospects of selling yet another SIM card with a data plan to let your digital camera connect... The technology is here. What we need now is some integration work and a seamless user experience. Qualcomm should also be very positive about this concept... Jeff Belk - could you please comment on that?