Cingular Go Phone: Digital Spectrum MemoryFrame 8000 Premium U-40100 8-Inch Wireless Digital Frame Review

Now that I've gone digital, I actually look at my photos even more than when they were stored in bulky albums and shoe boxes. Screen savers are nice, but I usually have a browser, my mail program, and a host of other stuff on my screen, so all I'd see would be strips and corners. My camera is digital. Why shouldn't my picture display be digital?

The Digital Spectrum MemoryFrame 8000 Premium U-40100 is a pretty sophisticated piece of work. To start with, it is not ugly. It contains a Windows CE computer that can support WiFi, USB, memory cards and Bluetooth, which is better than some laptops I've owned. The WiFi works pretty well. It's up on my WPA2 Apple Extreme/Express network. I had to enter the password with the remote control to get it started, but it is now a networked computer. I tested it out with Flickr, and it could download my photos and take advantage of Flickr's new photo "sets" folders.

I tried it with a Bluetooth dongle and set it up as an "other" device with no password / pairing code. Send file works. The image I send from my Apple laptop pops up on the picture frame nicely, but I cannot browse the frame's internal storage. In fact, once I try to browse, I can no longer send.

I hooked up a USB cable to my computer and was able to access the frame as a disk drive. That was pretty neat, but I would prefer a wireless solution. I haven't tried camera memory cards or a direct camera connection because I store my photos on my laptop. Since I backup my laptop, that means I back up my photos. I can't imagine why anyone with a home computer would care about this feature except for carrying photos to someone without email without burning a CD.

Supposedly, the frame can grab pictures from Windows machines running Windows Media Player 11. I don't have a Windows machine, so I couldn't test this. I do know that the current version cannot display photos shared using iPhoto's sharing mechanism.

If you want an easy to use, flexible, wireless digital picture frame, I'll recommend the Digital Spectrum MemoryFrame. It's not completely wireless. It needs a power cord, but, as I noted earlier, it's not ugly. With a bit of camouflage, it's a great way to enjoy your pictures.

Of course, Chez Kaleberg, I like to push the technology a bit, so I took advantage of push technology, and here we see one of the frame's weak points. It really wants to pull. If you hook up a USB cable, you can mount the frame as a disk and load whatever pictures you want into it, but it cannot be mounted as a disk using WiFi. I tried a port scan. The only ports were for a web site server, 80 and 443. This frame is actually running Apache, if that means anything to you. What I was hoping for was an Windows SMB service, or better yet, an FTP socket. That way, I could just load in the pictures I wanted to show.

Instead, I took advantage of another feature of the frame, it's ability to display pictures from an arbitrary public RSS picture feed. Since I havemy own web site, I could just store a feed there and tell the frame to bring in any pictures I wanted from the internet in general or from my local network. That means I can show webcam images from national parks, personal photos, website photos, business charts and weather reports. What a neat toy! I would have given it five stars, save for the lack of an FTP server.

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Product Description:
The MF-8000 Premium is a Photo, MP3 Audio and MPEG-4 Video player. As a bonus, audio can be played through built-in stereo speakers while a photo slideshow is playing.And because MF-8000 Premium is web enabled, you can enjoy all the content sent to you by your family and friends through the Internet and Photo Sharing Sites. MF-8000 Premium is also Windows Vista certified, so that you can take maximum advantage of new device features that allow MF-8000 to be shared by Vista playing new content as you desire.The MF-8000 has an 8" Bright Active Matrix TFT LCD Screen and delivers vivid high resolution photos and video. The MF-8000 Premium has changeable standard frame capability so it can be framed to suit any decor and displayed either tabletop or wall mounted. It comes with 256MB of internal memory plus a built-in multi-format card reader and a dedicated communication port (for Ethernet, Bluetooth etc.). A remote control is used to access the easy to use on board menu, giving you full control of the slide show and player functions. Included Digital PixMaster slideshow builder software allows users to create and save slideshows to/from their PC.