2. Parrot Specchio Frame, $500

We begin with a frame that may or may not be available in the U.S., and seems generally hard to find—it is that obscure. Parrot is a European company, and so if you’re willing to fork over 300 pounds for this French-designed piece of equipment, you might just be able to get your hands on one.

Parrot hired French modern artist Martin Szekely to create this distinctive look. The idea is simple: When it is off, the frame is a mirror. When it is on, it is a highly-reflective square frame that surrounds a very bright 4x6-inch image.

The notion is that people who don’t want to put an ugly black plastic digital frame in their living rooms might be tempted by the technology if only it came encased in a designer frame. The décor aspect might be enough to make some well-heeled buyers go for this frame, and it is attractive. The only downside to the mirrored-finish is that if your frame is in the same room as your television, the odds are it will reflect the screen in a distracting way.

The frame plugs into an outlet via a long curled cord. At the point where the cord meets the frame, there is an on/off button, and then a metal rod that houses the cord and screws into the back of the frame, keeping it upright. This is an excellent design.

The frame houses the slots for the basic camera cards and mini as well as standard USB ports, but to really interact with this frame, you need to operate the buttons on the back and manipulate them quite a bit to get the wireless features working.

These buttons on the back control modes like slideshows, and are the means for navigating menus. But to get this frame on the Internet, you have to use these buttons to enter a complex WEP code into a non-qwerty onscreen keyboard. It took forever to switch between numbers and letters, as in a typical hex code.

But, once the frame found our wireless network, it directed us to an IP address we could access from a computer on the same network. At this IP address was a relatively easy-to-navigate Web interface for controlling every aspect of the frame and the photos we wanted to share with it.

Parrot offers numerous ways to get photos onto the frame. The first method we tried was e-mail. According to the instructions, you can create an e-mail address for the frame, send photos to it from another address, and those photos will show up on the frame. Well, we never got this feature working. We created a Gmail address for the frame, entered in the proper identifiers (POP, server name, etc.) and the frame insisted that we had input something incorrectly, and refused to recognize the e-mail address as valid.

The next method we tried was RSS feeds. We had mixed results with this. Parrot mentions Flickr and Picasa by name as services that make it easy to share albums via RSS. We tried both services, and associated a feed to the frame worked just fine for public albums. But the frame’s interface suggests that private album RSS feeds should work as well because the frame offers fields to enter unique identifiers and passwords for albums. When we tried to enter these passwords, we received no photos, only error messages. So, you must be comfortable with public albums (that, if found, can be viewed by anyone on the Web) if you want to use this feature.

However, even though creating an email address for the frame didn’t work, Picasa has a feature that generates an e-mail address for one of your albums. So we shared the Picasa email address for a public album with our friends, them associated that album with the frame, and watched as new photos began circulating in the frame in our living room. We got a few fun surprises this way, and this combination of services and features is what truly sold us on this frame.

The other methods for transferring photos: sharing via a shared folder on a computer on the same network, and transferring photos via Wi-Fi or Bluetooth to the frame’s internal memory (200MB), worked without any trouble. We didn’t get to test the Near Field Communication (NFC) method for transferring photos since we don’t currently have any products available that communicate via the NFC standard. But we can imagine it would be fun to touch a phone to the frame, and have them instantly transfer over. Perhaps someday this will be de rigeur.
 We also weren’t able to share videos with the frame, since the frame only accepts the 3GP video file format—a format used by many European mobile phones. We didn’t have any around to try.

Once we had enough photos circulating through the frame, we came to appreciate the 720 x 480 resolution and brightness. This screen looks great in the low light of an average living room, and even though the reflective properties can become a nuisance while watching TV, it is enjoyable to keep the frame on in the background while people are at home. The surprise element introduced by allowing others to send images to the frame makes the experience exciting, but getting it set up in the first place can be a bit of a chore.