The iPhone of digital photo frames?

Let your fingers do the swiping.

(Credit: Pandigital)

It's hard to say whether this is innovative or just another company jumping on the touch-based gesture bandwagon, but Pandigital's announced a new line of digital photo frames with "intuitive" touch controls. Not surprisingly, the line's called PanTouch, but what's weird about it is that the whole touch part doesn't apply to the screen itself but the frame around the display.

What's this mean exactly? Well, check out the image and you'll notice that good looking index finger is touching the edge of the frame, not the screen itself. The press release says, "Customers can use touch and swipe motions on the surrounding matte to access to digital images, MP3 music and video clips." On a more mundane level, PanTouch frames will come in three models and sport 512MB of internal memory.

OK, this isn't exactly the way Apple would do a photo frame, but Pandigital appears to be doing its best to inject a little flare into the digital photo frame game. We'll let you know if it's a stupid idea--or not--when we get our hands on one, which should be soon.

[2planker]

At first it seems strange for the touch to be on the border but I bet it is to avoid finger prints on the screen. The last thing I want on my digital frame is finger prints from touching the screen.

[stewartwalker]

It absolutely makes sense! In fact it's a true sign that a manufacture knows its product and buyer. Clearly that good looking finger in the photo is clean and not greasy, but if you friends or kids want to check out the picture or play video etc, the last thing you want to do is clean it afterwards, everytime. Brilliant! I hope they're inexpensive enough to attrach mass appeal.

[sgreen2]

Touch controls are nice but the real issue with digital photo frames is the quality of the images. I bought and returned several before settling on the Philips 7FF1.<br />Do not forget to review the image quality David!

[seregacom]

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