Rob Pegoraro of The Washington Post today posted his take on the latest digital photo frames currently being offered in the market. He tested a few from Kodak, Ceiva Logic, Westinghouse Digital and Smartparts.
His experience is not 100% pleasant. As the manufacturers tried to outdo each other to add more features and tout these for marketing purposes, many of them actually did not live up to expectations. Some of them have grown too complex with many add-on features not really worth using.
For example, Smartparts’ $300 12-inch SPX12 and Ceiva’s $225 8-inch frame touted video capabilities but actually had problems playing video.
On MP3 playback, Rob observed that these critters did not have a simple way to shuffle music to accompany a slideshow, they play the same song over and over again until your ears bleed.
And while some digital photo frames now feature Wi-Fi, in actual practice, some of them limit the utility of the wireless connections to a few preset functions, i.e., to the company’s own website.
“But the greatest failing of these frames wasn’t any one missing feature, but their overall clumsiness. I kept running into silly little usability flaws that should have been fixed early in the design stage, but survived to become constant nuisances,†wrote Rob.
[Via: WashingtonPost.com]