Monday, May 4, 2009

D-Link Internet Photo Frame Reviewed

D-Link DSM-210 WiFi Internet Photo Frame
The photo frame joins Social Networking

With Mother's Day just around the corner, my attention turned to finding a gift that could make a real difference for my Mom. Just a little over a year since my Dad passed away, I'm faced with the reality that my Mom is more alone than ever. This means there's a lot of pressure on me to be there for her, made very difficult by the fact that she lives 4 hours away.

Daily phone conversations leave much to be desired. However, ever since Dad passed, Mom has become less and less tech-savvy. She used to sit and check her email, browse the web, and look at my and my wife's pictures online from our Apple MobileMe account. Without my Dad there, however, she has turned away from the computer, and I'm lucky if one email exchange a month occurs. The problem is, I have moved along with the rest of my generation (and newer generations) away from the telephone, and into social networks, online.

FaceBook and Twitter have become my Social Networks of choice... and I'm (as you can see) starting to Blog using blogger.com. Suddenly the half hour phone calls are just out of step with my life. So, in an effort to give my non-tech savvy Mom a window into this new universe that I inhabit, I'm employing a new Internet Appliance called the Internet Photo Frame.

Several companies have started making enhanced versions of the now-ubiquitous electronic photo frame. These Internet-attached frames can attach to RSS (really simple syndication) feeds which are available from diverse sources such as your local news channel or your favorite political party. They can also attach to Social Networking sites such as FaceBook and Twitter.

A free Web-based service called "FrameChannel.com" further enhances the available content for an Internet photo frame. This service allows easy access to RSS feeds, Social Network sites, photo sharing sites such as MobileMe from Apple, and custom content like weather and daily horoscopes.

After researching Kodak, D-Link, and a handful of other possible Frame choices, I settled on the D-Link DSM-210. This very new product caught my eye because of it's unique auto-sleep capability linked to a motion sensor, appealing to my "greener" side to save power.

In my research efforts, I discovered that the telephone and live-chat support services for Kodak and D-Link are very much lacking any practical knowledge or information about these devices. Kodak, for instance, insisted that I would need a computer turned on in my Local Area Network to feed information to their frame. I'm certain this isn't the case- because these frames are specifically made to link directly to Internet content.

Once my D-Link arrived, I hit a similar snafoo with their tech support; after setting up a FrameChannel feed (see below) on the Internet, and pairing my frame with the FrameChannel site, I discovered that the slides (each screen is called a "slide" for these devices) advanced once every 10 seconds. The DSM-210 has a menu option to change this interval from 3s to 1h, but no change would work- it only advanced once every 10s. I called D-Link, and they told me that the frame had to be faulty, and to return it to Amazon.

This didn't sit well with me- afterall, it just didn't make sense that the frame would work perfectly otherwise, but not allow me to change the advance slide interval. To test this out, I actually loaded some photos into the "favorites" on-board memory for the frame, and set those to advance every 30s. This worked. So, I became fairly certain that the interval setting for the FrameChannel feed was being controlled from the Internet, not from the Frame. This proved to be true. D-Link should have known.

The setup of the Internet Frame from D-Link was very simple. First I unboxed the frame, plugged it in, and used the remote control to attach it to our WiFi network at home. Then I went to FrameChannel.com and registered for a new account. Almost immediately the web site asks for the activation code from the frame. Going to Internet on the frame displayed this code. That's it for Frame-side configuration. You can control the transition between slides, and that's about all.

All the other settings come from the FrameChannel.com web site. You can browse through dozens of information sources, and add them to your channel (located under the My Frame Channel tab on the account Home page). Under account settings, you can then control the individual settings for each information source... for instance, you can set the picture display interval time for your pictures from MobileMe to 30 seconds, and the Buddha's Quote for the day can display for 2 minutes at a time between 7 AM and 9 AM weekdays. Discovering these detailed "Channel Rules" was critical to accomplishing what I want to do for my Mom.

Now the frame is configured. In the morning it displays the local news RSS feed, in rotation with photos from my MobileMe gallery. As the day progresses, it switches to the daily horoscope, the three day forecast, a generic quote of the day, and in the evening it shows my blog RSS feed and Twitter feeds. This way, I can send messages directly to Mom (I set up a Twitter account for her for the soul purpose of following my feed and displaying it on her frame).  Now, rather than relying on that daily (or less) phone call at odd hours while I'm driving in rush hour traffic, Mom can see bits and pieces of my Social Networking life, and share in my latest photos.

Best of all, Mom doesn't have to log into anything, type anything, and can't accidentally delete anything! The frame is as passive as a television, delivering interesting content that I can customize and control remotely via FrameChannel at any time. I can even send photos from my iPhone immediately into the frame. This is an incredible, easy, and inexpensive solution that helps fill a need in my Mom's life. Who knows, perhaps she'll ask for an iPod touch for Christmas, and then start twittering back to me!

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