Kodak OLED touchscreen digiframe gets it all right, except the price.
A while back, Joel and I were muttering about digital frames. They're certainly some sort of future of simulated grandwhelp display, but they tend to be chintzy in the wrong places. Joel speculated that it was time to get excited about digital frames when they went entirely touchscreen, upped the screen quality and — most importantly — slurped pictures in directly from the Internet via any RSS feed, with none of this proprietary photo hosting site system horseshit.
According to our metric, then, Kodak's 7.6 Wireless OLED digital frame is the first one really worth being excited about. The display has a touchscreen resolution of 800x480, and will wirelessly pull in RSS feeds from a number of online photo sharing web sites, including Flickr. It also links up to your PC and automatically shares and shuffles through your stored photo collection. There's even swank widget support, a built-in stereo for pumping out music and a auto-dimming ambient light sensor.
It looks great, but in a sea of $100 Wal-Mart cheapies, the price is staggering: just a buck short of a grand. So now we have a new metric: when this caliber of digital frame comes in at less than a couple hundred bucks, then we'll get excited about digiframes.
Kodak OLED 7.6-inch Wireless Digital Frame [Amazon via Slashgear]
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Hell, let's go for full convergence here.
Add another inch to the screen, up the resolution a little, add a good web browser (with flash!), and a virtual keyboard.
Then mount it upside down and let the screen fold up (tablet style), and you've got a perfect kitchen PC!.
That should be doable for $1000 within the next year, right?
Can't you buy one of them newfangled netbooks for, like, $400 now? Why on earth would you spend $1000 on this frame when you could own an entire new computer for less than half the price? Sure, no touchscreen, but who needs that anyway on a picture frame?
You're paying for the screen on this one. OLED still ain't cheap.