Last week, I dusted out a digital photo frame that was awarded to me two years back while at Microsoft by “TSP Academy”, a distance learning program designed for “peer-to-peer” coaching & learning for Microsoft's field technology professionals.
It is a 5” LCD photo frame that had multiple memory slots and an inbuilt speaker for playing music while displaying the pictures. While setting it up, I started thinking about few “Wouldn’t it be great if…” scenarios.
I could immediately think of USB interface instead a memory slot so that I could store hundreds of pictures on a memory stick or external hard disk and/or even better a 802.11 wireless feature that would allow me to directly stream pictures / video and audio from home PC storage.
During my nomadic search on the net, I stumbled upon two new models of photo frame by Samsung and Sony just released last week with some interesting features.
Let’s take Samsung first
Internet Photo Frame SPF-85V is an 8-inch, WiFi-enabled device for an estimated street price of $199.99.
It had all typical features of photo frame with USB 2.0 interface. Interestingly this device is optimized for use with Microsoft’s Windows Live Space for easy photo streaming.
Additionally, it also came with Samsung’s InfoLink feature, which offers the ability to receive RSS feeds from “USA Today” and www.framechannel.com. This device could also work as a second monitor using Samsung’s UbiSync Technology that uses only USB Cable!
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Looking at Sony,
SONY VAIO Wi-Fi Photo Frame comes with a 7”5, 800x480 screen. It can locate and playback all the photos from your PC, display from memory cards or directly from the built-in 128MB internal storage.
Again the interesting feature is displaying pictures from Google's Picasaweb albums!
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It is indeed interesting that we are starting to see emergence of consumer device from hardware vendor that leverage services from a different software vendor.
Just Visualize, videos from Youtube, Music from iTunes, RSS feeds from your own favorite news site, your calendar, your blog or any service out in the cloud streamed into your photo frame!!!
Let me extend my imagination a little bit…
How nice would it be to have similar USB port and wireless network chips embedded on our TV sets, converting them into large photo frames?
1 comment:
Well, invest in a $50 Wi-Fi add-on to your Xbox 360 and it instantly turns your TV into a digital photo frame. There are software that take snapshots of webpages and publish h-res images of news sites that can be read on you TV screen while navigating them with the normal remote control. All the scenarios that you mentioned are possible with the combo of Xbox 360and a TV :-)
BTW, Xbox + Xbox Live is one of the classic and most successful implementations of S+S.
-Jani
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