As much as I love the idea of digital picture frames, they don’t really do me all that much good. Once the nail is in and the frame is up, I forget about it. There it sits for months at a time with but a handful of pictures, doing little more than three or four standard frames and 62 cents worth of Costco prints could.
With that in mind, T-Mobile’s soon-to-be-announced CAMEO picture frame may be a little bit more my style. You drop $100 bucks for the frame, and then pay $10 dollars a month for a SIM card and number to go along with it. Got a shot you want everyone back at home to see? Send it to the CAMEO as an SMS – Bam! It’s on the frame’s 7-inch, 720×480 resolution screen.
The $100 dollar initial fee isn’t too bad, but the $10 dollar monthly fee is a bit much for something that might save you all of two minutes each of the three times you remembered to use it. If you’re not sending an insane number of pictures to this thing each month, the dollars-to-megabytes ratio just doesn’t balance out. When all is said and done after the first year, you’ve just shelled out $220 bucks for a 7-inch picture frame.
Full specs after the jump.
* High-resolution digital TFT screen with 720 x 480 pixels
* Displays photos with 262 144 colours
* Display dimensions: 130 x 87 mm
* Connections:
• GPRS Class 10 (dual band) for transferring photos from a phone
• Mini USB port (for transferring photos from a PC)
• SD/MMC card slot (for transferring photos directly from a camera)
* Receives MMS messages
* Photo format: JPEG and GIF
* Stores up to 500 photos
* Automatically adapts the picture size to the screen
* Brightness adjustment
* Automatically rotates the picture (portrait/landscape)
* Adjustable backlight (manual or automatic)
* External frame with an interchangeable leather surroundMemory cards accepted:
SD, miniSD (with adapter), microSD (with adapter), MMC, RS-MMC (with adapter), MMC plus, MMC mobile (with adapter), MMC micro (with adapter), SDHC, mini SDHC (with adapter).