eStarling WiFi-enabled Digital Photo Frame

This newly announced digital photo frame caught my eye this morning. Not only does it have WiFi, but it can consume RSS feeds of photos from Flickr, Google Picasa, Webshots, and others. Called the eStarling, you can find more information about the product and ordering from www.estarling.com. Currently, the price is right around $250.

The photo frame has a 7" color LCD to display your pictures. If you have images on memory media, the frame does have a built-in reader for MMC/SD, Compact Flash, and Memory Stick media. There is 128MB of internal storage than can store about 200 (appropriately sized) images.

The eStarling can connect to 802.11b/g wireless networks and it does support WEP encryption. You can update the images on the device (in addition to using the card reader) by having it update itself automatically from photo RSS feeds from Flickr, Google Picasa, Webshots and other image sharing sites. In order for the eStarling to be able to use RSS feeds from the photo-sharing sites, users will need to sign up (free) for the eStarling Connect site. Not only can it pull down images that you upload from another computer, but if you add images to the eStarling using the built-in card reader, it can publish those pictures to the photo-sharing sites as well.

To get the frame set up, you will need a Windows 200/XP computer. Once it is set up (less than 10 minutes), you can leave it disconnected from the computer.

While it's not the cheapest photo frame out there, the ability to update itself automatically (and publish images) is very cool. Just think of the gift possibilities: on an office desk where the desk owner can see the latest pictures from the kid's trip to the zoo; for grandparents (with WiFi) so they don't even have to turn on their computer to see pictures.