Ipevo's convertible Wi-Fi photo frame

Ipevo's Kaleido R7 digital photo frame displays photos wirelessly from a PC.

(Credit: Erica Ogg/CNET News)

Ipevo CEO Royce Hong and I have something in common: we hate digital photo frames.

In his words, digital photo frames so far have been expensive, with poor design, a difficult user interface, and poor image resolution. I have to agree. But the Ipevo Kaleido R7, which his company created, tries to tackle these concerns.

First, there's no need for an SD card. The device uses Wi-Fi to get photos directly from your PC's hard drive, or from a photo-sharing service like Picasa or Flickr. Or, with the 512MB of memory included in the frame, up to 5,000 photos can be stored on it. The Kaleido also comes with a remote control and software that allows you to organize your photos into channels or playlists, and then schedule what pictures are rotated through the display, and when.

The display itself looks a bit like Sony's XEL-1 OLED TV--sans the thinness. It's a 7-inch horizontal frame with 800x480 resolution that stands on a single foot. Along the base of the frame are touch-responsive buttons that will scroll through photos, pause, reverse, and flip channels, or photo playlists.

The Kaleido isn't stuck showing just landscape-style photos, however. The frame can also be rotated to a vertical orientation.

The frame will ship with its own Mac- and PC-compatible software, which Hong describes as "iTunes for photos." The aesthetic is similar to the Apple music software, but doesn't connect to an online store like iTunes.

The Kaleido R7 doesn't have a final price yet, but will be somewhere between $199 and $249 when it debuts officially at CES in January.

[MadLyb]

So, a person frustrated with resolution bumps us to 800x480? That's not even a half of a Megapixel.

My new phone, I repeat phone, has that resolution. Where are the true high resolution screens? I take pictures at 10MP and then have to display them on a screen where the best frames on the market barely exceed 1MP?!

I love technology, and really love the idea of digital frames, but for now I will stick with real prints.

[scs68]

This frame fails on the very first challenge, price. No matter how appealing the digital frame concept is, $249 is too much to pay for what is essentially a replacement for a $10 frame and a pile of $.05 prints. The design is no great shakes either. A picture frame shouldn't look like a small TV or computer terminal, it should look like a...well, picture frame.