Wireless Digital Photo Frames, e-Books – One Step Down from NetBook? Small but disruptive technology advancements …

A recent EE Times issue [“Photo frames vie to be ‘third screen’ at home”, J. Yoshida, EE Times Edge, 23 Feb 09] and interest at the Consumer Electronics Show highlighted the potential for a growing market for wireless digital photo frames. The EE Times article quotes Marvell’s Kishore Manghani, VP for application processors, as saying “A major revolution is happening …” The same article quotes Chumby Industries CEO Stephen Tomlin as referring to the new frames as “a new class of personal consumer device…” Is this the next big opportunity in in-home consumer electronics? Or is the opportunity even larger?

I’ve never had an interest in having an electronic picture frame, preloaded with a static collection of pictures I’ve seen many times before. I do look with interest at the picture frames of people I visit, as often the choice of photos tell me something either about them, or more likely their spouse. For me, though, no thanks. I’d be one of the EE Times article’s suggested 40% of frame owners who’ve left them in the box, never to be plugged in.

Newer models have some interesting capabilities that may make me change my mind. Wireless capabilities (3G or Wi-Fi) are popping in to some models, along with peppier processing power, touch screens, and a significant real-time operating system.

With the addition of these new capabilities, we suddenly can imagine something completely different than a boring mostly-static display of a limited collection of cute kid photos. Add in video clips, audio, web-based widgets. Think now of a device which is essentially a netbook, a dumbed-down, size-reduced laptop with very limited input capabilities but fully capable dynamic video displays.

Now there are some difficulties still with the home wireless setup. In our houses, when we set up our wireless routers, we either expose our internet connection to the world by having no authentication, or we impose some password or MAC-based authentication. Send grandma the nice wireless digital photo frame, and who’s going to install it? Our in-home wireless connectivity is great, once installed, but non-trivial to get installed. We accept that overhead on our complex and expensive devices such as our laptops, but for a relatively inexpensive consumer device like a photo frame? Just leave it in the box.

Enter 3G. Now you buy a SIM card for the picture frame that runs the Android operating system and connects something like your cell phone. Before you send it to grandma, you configure it to connect once a day to your favorite photo sharing site and pull down any new photos you’ve just taken, such as of Uncle Billy sleeping in the hammock next to the huge pile of beer cans your kids collected and used to set him up. {Sorry, Uncle WC, if you read this … dad made us do it!}  Costs would have to go down, conceivably by having a plan that restricts usage to off-peak hours and limited instantaneous bandwidth.

Or, we have a revolution in setting up our home Wi-Fi, where you do Bluetooth-like pairing … at the wireless interface controller, you push a button to register a new device, it asks for what duration to register it and flashes up a 4-digit registration code, you push a button on the device to register, enter that same 4-digit code, and bingo, connection to the network. Grandma can do that much. Also makes the registration of your friend’s laptop easier when he/she comes over for a visit, or your daughter’s friend’s new Apple iTouch, or your new home media network, or wireless video system, and so many other things that are tapping into the home wireless capabilities.  But I digress …

So, now you’ve got grandma set up, and can freshen up the photo displays, and even have short videos of the grandkids burying Uncle Billy in sand at the beach. She’ll be more interested, and now in addition to wanting you to call every Sunday morning, she’ll want new pictures every week as well.  Bet you didn’t think of ‘setting expectations’ when you sent the updatable digital frame, did you?

But, is that all this device is in the mind of the consumer? Let’s consider some other uses, applications that are primarily [audio and] video output, requiring little or no input.

1. Webcams. My wife likes a webcam view of a beach near where she once lived. Some parents would like to continuously monitor the activities of their kids at preschool, others the activities of their nannies or cleaners. A friend of mine installed a webcam in the kitchen of his aging mother’s apartment as she lives by herself overseas and doesn’t have anyone checking up on her regularly.
2. Widgets. Stock tickers, current and predicted weather, news headlines, dashboards. Remind grandma of when she’s supposed to take those pills, and the pictures don’t come back until she presses the “OK, stop nagging” button on the touch-sensitive screen.
3. Caller ID on steroids. Link in with your favorite Voice Over IP software so that when grandma gets a call from you, she sees pictures of you, gets reminded if your birthday is coming up (or anniversary or kids special days …). Maybe it tells her when you last called, so she can scold you if you’ve been bad, and can remember that you called just two days ago if she’s forgetful.
4. Remote controllers. For home automation enthusiasts, a display device with touch sensitive screen can function as a monitoring and control device.
5. Streaming audio and/or video broadcasts. With decent audio output capabilities, you can have your favorite streaming radio station playing at your desk without taking up space on your computer screen. Or, attend a virtual webinar or meeting where you aren’t expected to do much besides watch and listen.

This device becomes very similar in capabilities to Apple’s iTouch and its kin, except for the portability and size aspects. Can we have a model that is portable, that is, one that is removable from its docking station? Of course grandma will set it some place for a while, getting distracted by other things, so she’ll need to be reminded by the frame to put it back in the docking station to recharge, and it will need some power control options so it doesn’t run down while grandma’s at bingo on Thursday nights. 

But if it is portable, is it now in disruption competition with the Sony Reader Digital Book or Amazon’s Kindle (see forbes.com’s article by Renee Hopkins Callahan)?

I won’t write here about the well-covered shrunken PC products, the netbooks, as grandma already has her home computer and doesn’t want to take one with her when she travels. However I will suggest that this class of device, varying slightly in capabilities, is the real disruption factor in technologies for the next 5 years. We will need to make wireless device configuration much more painless, targeting non-geek consumers, and of course we’ll need strong security and well thought out interoperability. But we’ll work in a newly disrupted market that’s much larger than a netbook, e-book, or electronic photo frame.

I’m going to be writing a bit more on some of the functionality this makes possible that I believe both geeks and non-geeks will want. Let me know your feedback.