Thrown together by well-traveled ODM
Inventec, i-mate's new
Momento series of digital picture frames break some important ground. First of all, they do WiFi -- a seemingly obvious feature for this category of devices that's inexplicably missing from a majority of the mainstream models currently in the marketplace. Next up, the Momento is among the very first commercially available devices to support Microsoft's
SideShow concept for secondary displays that should (theoretically, anyway) untether all manner of information from the PCs on which it typically resides. In that respect, the Momento is very much a first-generation device -- but as a picture frame, we came into the hands-on expecting a certain level of refinement, now that they've had a few years to ripen on the vine. Does the unit deliver on its promise as a highly connected, Vista-compatible accessory? Does it deliver as a plain ol' frame, for that matter? We took the $200 Momento 70 -- the smaller of the two, clocking in at 7 inches of diagonal real estate -- for a test drive to get some answers.
Opening the Momento's ample packaging reveals surprisingly little: you get a skimpy user's manual (short enough to qualify as a separate Getting Started pamphlet by many manufacturer's standards), an AC adapter with several interchangeable plugs for use in different countries, an RF remote control, and the device itself.
Our first observation: styling traditionalists need not apply. Thanks to its white frame encased in clear acrylic, the Momento has a modern, vaguely Apple-esque appearance that won't
blend if you're looking for a photo frame
that just looks like a photo frame. Of course, that's just fine for many folks, and the company is promising replacement frames in black and pink -- a good start. Our advice to i-mate? Adding a good, old-fashioned wood frame to the accessory list would go a long way to making everyone happy here.
With a traditional digital frame, right here is pretty much where our hands-on would end; you'd plug 'er in, slip in the memory card of your choice, and you're off to the races. With support for SD, MMC, SmartMedia, xD, and Memory Stick, you can go that route with the Momento, too -- but it's capable of so much more. The strength of the Momento really lies in its ability to keep the memory cards firmly planted in your camera where they belong by firing up the WiFi and pulling pictures down from the XP- or Vista-based box of your choice with Windows Media Connect (also known as "Media Sharing" in Windows Media Player 11) enabled.
For us, setting up the Momento's WiFi connectivity was an exercise in frustration. We eventually got it working, but only long after we suspect the average consumer would've given up and packed it for return. The madness began when we fired up the frame for the first time; it detected our 802.11g network right away and prompted us to enter the WPA key. Well, we did that. The Momento happily accepted it, even, and proceeded to the next screen where we were told no Windows Media Connect systems were found on the network. We knew that wasn't the case, so we rebooted and selected the network again. This time, instead of entering the WPA key, we selected the "Use existing settings" option, which froze the unit. We were able to freeze it this way again and again; the option simply doesn't work (ah, the joys of early firmware revisions!). Next we tried using the frame's USB port to load wireless settings via Windows Connect Now -- which it allegedly supports -- but were repeatedly issued an error that the USB drive couldn't be read. Anyway, we eventually discovered that the Momento was totally not cool with our Netgear WAG102's WPA / WPA2 hybrid functionality; setting it to pure WPA (and frustratingly changing all our existing devices to use WPA) cleared the issue right up and the frame happily connected.
Going back to the Momento's basic functionality for a moment, we found the 800 x 400 screen was plenty crisp, bright, and contrasty for use in pretty much any environment. All menus and frame functionality (with the exception of power) is accessed exclusively from the very thin, very small remote control. While the remote was easy to use and RF is always a bonus over infrared, you'd be up a creek if you lost it -- no wonder i-mate is proclaiming replacements will be available from its website. You get all the typical photo frame goodies like a power saver mode that can dim the display during certain hours, an on-screen calendar and clock, and a pretty healthy selection of slideshow transitions. We were disappointed to find that there was no simple "fade out / fade in" transition; the device felt a little sluggish while we were setting options, so we suppose it's possible there's not enough processing power under the hood to make a smooth fade.
Now on to the cool part: PC connectivity. As we alluded to before, this is where the Momento shines. Selecting pictures to display that we had chosen to share from our Vista server was quick and painless; just press the remote's "Play" button on the folder you want to show. Of course, there are other ways to mix it up, too -- playlists, photos with certain ratings or tags, and so on.
Another major push on i-mate's part is "MomentoLive," which goes head-to-head with services like
Ceiva. At $40 a year, MomentoLive offers an allowance of pictures that can be received through the MomentoLive website, email, or MMS, an online photo organization system, and what i-mate is calling "PictureStreams" -- basically a straight-to-frame RSS photo aggregator. That's all well and good, but what disturbs us a little is that i-mate is touting pushed firmware updates as one benefit of membership. We believe that functional firmware should come free of charge with any device you buy (and we think owners will, too) so we sincerely hope there'll be a way to get the updates at no cost. We didn't have an opportunity to put MomentoLive through its paces, but the device comes with a 90-day free trial -- plenty of time to figure out whether it's worth the forty bones annually.
The most intriguing feature of the Momento is one that seems almost played down by i-mate: support for Microsoft SideShow. There's no mention of the support in the frame's terse manual, and it's mentioned only in passing on i-mate's website. We kinda think i-mate is missing the boat here -- SideShow holds the promise of turning digital picture frames from minimally functional entertainment devices with little practical function into seamless extensions of our desktop PCs. Sure, it's cool to be able to glance at photos out of your album and even cooler to get streamed new photos from friends and family, but overlaying useful information on the display should really take the device to a new level.
Imagine our disappointment, then, at the utter dearth of SideShow gadgets in the wild. What we didn't realize before installing the frame was that SideShow gadgets are totally different beasts from Sidebar gadgets -- they're not interchangeable -- and while Microsoft's Sidebar gadget site is flush with interesting new gadgets, the equivalent site for SideShow gadgets shows an anemic four: Stocks (currently in beta), Web Pictures, Picture Viewer (also in beta), and a simple RSS viewer. No weather gadgets, no traffic gadgets, no nifty performance meters to monitor our PCs remotely. Will they come eventually? Yeah, maybe -- if SideShow takes off -- but in the meantime, it's little more than a novelty.
Installing the Momento as a SideShow-compatible secondary display on our PC was simple enough (though poorly documented) and involved downloading a driver from i-mate's site. Besides the four gadgets offered up from Microsoft's gallery, Vista rocks two out of the box: a Windows Mail gadget and a Media Player playlist gadget. We enabled the Media Player one from the PC's control panel, and away we went. The gadget looks nice enough -- and it was plenty unobtrusive, thanks to its location and translucence -- but again, until more useful gadgets start hitting the pipeline, we're lukewarm on the feature.
So is the Momento a wise purchase? At $300, our answer would be a solid "no" -- but at the $200 i-mate is asking for the 7-inch model, it's an interesting proposition because the premium you pay for the WiFi, USB port, audio support, and SideShow integration is virtually zero. We're guessing the firmware will only get better, SideShow gadgets will start to multiply, and in general, the device is going to only get better with age. If you're cool with the Momento's polarizing styling, it's worth a try.
posted Feb 25th 2007 10:39PM
The past week or so, each time I try or someone on my friends list
tries to email me a picture to my imate frame via my momentolive.com
email addy, we get a email back from our email service provider that
says Delivery Status Notification (Failure) TEMP_FAILURE: Connection
was dropped by remote host (SENT_RCPT) error. I emailed both momento
and imate support several times to no avail.
Any idea's? Did they pull the plug on the service? I noticed as
well that it doesn't add the pictures any longer in the momento
website as it did when I used to email the pictures to the frame.
Just got the Memento 70 as a gift about a week ago. After reading all of these comments I wondered if it was going to do the job.
I guess I have the latest or near latest firmware version so a lot of the issues have now gone away.
I did not read the start guide, I am a man, we don't do that sort of thing.
I switched it on and it asked my region. Next it found my WiFi network first time. I then entered my network security key and I could then see the computers on my network. On my PCs the MediaPlayer popped up a window, all by itself to ask if I wanted to share media with the Memento 70. I said yes and could then navigate via the Memento 70 remote control to the folder that had the images in that I wanted to see in my slide show.
That was it, it works and works well.
I also registered on the www.momentolive.com and set-up a RSS feed for FREE. There does not seem to be any charge for the use of the Memento Live site anymore.
So, my conclution is buy it, £55.00 (UK price) ($110.00US) is a bargin.
I bought a momento 70 a few days ago (now mid july 2008).
My momento has firmware version 1.3.1571.22
I think i saw posting about this version 1 year ago.
Has someone already got a newer one ?
How about loading a self build firmware ? Are there projects (e.g. linux) on the net which can be downloaded into momento 70 ? Has someone found interesting test points inside momento 70 ?
Regards,
Martin
Hi. Can you confirm that you got the RSS feed working? And that it still works.?
My new Momento connects to wifi and Mom'Live site without problems, but nothing seems to come through (Flickr RSS or if I email an attached pic).
TIA
Phil
@ Smeggy
Hi, did you ever get this working properly with a Flickr RSS feed?
Or any sort of feed from the internet ? (not from another pc on the network)
If so, I'd be very interested to know how.
TIA
Just ordered one of these for £55 from eBuyer.
Can they really be as good as they sound for that price ?
Had been looking at poor quality lower res units for not much less money.
Anyway, cant wait to get it and play with the wifi / streaming from MomentoLive / Flickr side of things.
I'm assuming I can do that without another PC being turned on ??
Any set-up advice / tips would be appreciated.
Phil im having the same problems.... frustrating.
received as a xmas gift wont find network during set up...no help from tech support I dont have proff of purchase "GIFT"
You're not going to get any support and response from them, iMate decided to cancel their Momento Live services. On Feb. 25, it goes down permanently so you need to get all your photos out of your account before then. I posted on another page on Engadget so I really hope you see one of the posts in time and don't lose any of your pictures.
If you liked the Momento Live web services, you could try going with another company that provides similar services as well. I just found out today that this digital frame company is doing a deal for iMate customers whose Momento Live services were cancelled.
http://www.ceiva.com/home/nf/momentolive.jsp
awesome. i want this! good specs and a good price too. cheers en~
This is a pretty good hands-on review. Great job Engadget. This device looks really cool, if it weren't only for the big price tag. But it looks awesome to me.
Why is every single story digged in engadget?
Because I keep digging them.
Support the Cause Cure ALS! http://www.misaoforacause.com
Can this act as a Windows Media Center Extender? (Play movies, music, etc?) Browse internet?
Am I the only one who thinks this sucks?
received as a xmas gift cant get any support due to "me" not having proof of purchase after 3 attempts trying to get help I now have a pretty frame that collects dust
In my opinion Digital Picture frames are cute but personally I think that they're Too overpriced for the mainstream market. I think the top price margin that people would be willing to pay for something like this (7") would be about $75. Until that price is met those things will sit on the shelves of Targets, Wal Marts etc
It is very intriguing when a photoframe can act as a secondary display for the vista Sideshow. Now a photoframe can finally be of some real functional value, in addition to its emotional value. As a company i-mate continues to surprise me with its innovative product. The latest being the Ultimate 7150. Well done. Keep up the good work.
Thanks for the review Chris. We agree with your comments that the frame design may a bit too modern for some tastes. We will shortly be releasing coloured frames & mattes as well as more traditional designs to attach to Momento. Support for WPA2 is coming soon and will be available via a remote software update. And incidentally, all updates are free for the life of the frame provided it has been registered on MomentoLive.com.
Finally, we are waiting for more SideShow gadgets to be written too, so that Momento's functional appeal can be unlocked.
Why do they always have to have these huge bezels?
Contrary to it's name a pictureframe is not about the frame but about the picture. I don't mind it being thick, but the bezel around the actual image area should be as small as possible. They can do it with monitors and laptop screens ...
Do I smell some trouble coming from Apple? People should know better than to tack an I in front of their products. I-smell a lawsuit.
I-Mate have been around for years, this is not a new company, only a new product, Apple lost their chance to sue many many years ago, which they would have had to have done when I-Mate first came into existance.
As for the frame, I do find it interesting, at 300, a little to pricey, I am in the process of redoing my living room (new drywall/insulation/wiring/everything), and have been debating building into the wall a number of digital frames (only the LCD being visible, not the frame portion). With wifi and RF, this makes things alot easier on me by only needing to provide power, but at $200 to $300 each, thats still a little too high, not spending $3k for a bunch of frames....
At $200 I might buy one for myself but I wouldn't buy one as a gift and that's where I think the market for these things really is: I'd love to buy one for my parents that live 200miles away and have them subscribe to my flickr feed so it automatically downloads photos as I post them so my parents can see what me and my family are up to without me having to direct them to a website.
This is *exactly* what I'd like to see. I cant believe no one has made one yet.
Next time, please put the fact that it only works with Windows up at the top, and save us a couple of minutes of reading.
How is RSS support? I'm a Mac user, and am wondering whether I'd just have to set up an RSS feed by hand, or whether this device will Never Ever work with OS X. Oh, and does it have to find a Windows Media Connect thing in order to use the network connection, or is it enough to just connect to the router?
Ross,
all you need for RSS to work is a Momentolive.com account, a Momento frame and a wireless router with an internet connection. You can use a Mac browser like Safari or Firefox to go to www.momentolive.com and register your frame. From then on you can use the site to browse through RSS feeds and save them as Picture Streams, and then browse to them on your frame.
Windows Media Connect is only a requirement if you want to view pictures from your Windows PC (and Vista is a requirement if you want to use Windows SideShow).
HTH.
Regards,
Matt
I've had a Momento here for a while, and your experiences are very different than mine. Using a USB flash key to setup the wireless (Windows Connect Now) is slick and easy. Works on XP or Vista. I've blogged lots about this one myself.
http://blogs.digitalmediaphile.com/barb/CategoryView,category,Momento.aspx
Would it be posisble to have it cycle through snapshots from say an external camera? Could these be dumpednito a directory and then displayed? What about live video via wireless?
I'd be curious to know if the RF remotes can be coded to individual frames. Mounting a number of these in my wall where I have no access to the built in controls, I may with to configure then individually, rather then all at the same time :(
So, if I understand correctly, the RSS functionality is not built into the frame, but is only available (to non-Windows) users is they subscribe to the ($40/yr) online service? Sounds like I'll be waiting until it's been hacked to pick one up. Which is a shame, since it looks like great hardware.
Jason, yes you can pair individual remotes and frames. We've used this at big events where we had a dozen frames mounted into a wall, and wanted to change individual frames' content. It looked pretty cool, too :)
BLKMGK, you asked about external digital stills camera support.
Yes, some but not all digital stills cameras are supported. Any camera that supports the USB Mass Storage Device protocol should appear as a USB device on the Momento. And for those that don't it's a simple matter of whipping out the storage card (SD/MMC/XD/MemoryStick/SmartMedia) from the camera and slotting it into the Momento.
HTH.
Regards,
Matt
It's not $200. The full featured device is $200 plus $40 / year.
Just freakin' give me a wifi digiframe that does NOT force me to use a half-assed service that's not gonna do what I want it to do anyway. Just give me wifi and a picture downloader that's using some standard technology (like RSS) and be done with it.
Price it reasonably and I'll actually buy one of these things.
Ooooh, I like the choice of music. Those 2 tracks especially --Zocalo & Gypsy women-- are some his best recent work. And here I thought all Engadget readers listened to Punk rock. Lol, nice one.... oh and the gadget's nice as well ;)
No Wireless pls.
If you're looking for a very high quality and easy to use Digital Multimedia player, you might want to take a look at this article
http://www.letsgodigital.org/html/review/photo_frame/sun_sg8.html
So, using SideShow, can the device play different music than whats playing on the PC? Could I have this in a different room than my PC and play a different song that what I have playing in my office PC?
The Momento picture frame can do that. On Momento Live you specify the picture stream you want to see and it will add it to the Momento as a play source. Optionally you can be alerted when a new picture is added to the picture stream.
I'm thinking about getting one of these as a gift for someone who uses a WEP wireless network. I only saw references to WPA and WPA2 hybrid networks - does the i-mate require a WPA connection?
Also, is the RSS feed functionality only available with the $40/year subscription, or can the frame receive feeds for free (I saw that the frame had to be registered to receive feeds, but does registration imply a paid subscription?)
Hi all- I just won one of these and have a Mac (so won't be using the Windows streaming options) and wireless- could not connect via WEP despite it detecting the network (and showing WEP options in the scant manual) but WPA was straightforward and works fine sending pics via email.The subscription is free for 3 months it seems so have to assume that my options will decrease if I don't cough up later.As RSS feeds are added from the online momentolive account I assume access to that cuts off if you don't subscribe after the 3 months.
Since Matt is following the comments: I think you're loosing a lot of potential purchasers, such as me, because of the Momento Live subscription fee. Life is already too full of monthly and annual fees (home rent, light, gas, electricity, car insurance, internet connection) to add another one. I don't think you want you frame to be a luxury item. Should all net services be free, I'd purchase it today and probably the 10" version. But I have no intention to have another bill on top of the other ones. Please, for the users and for yourself, reconsider the fees. There are many other WiFi picture frames coming out, the first which will be without fees will win TONS of purchasers. Kodak is already selling a WiFi capable frame. Not sure about which functionalities it has in common with Momento, but, even if it should be lacking in functionalities, it's just a matter of time. Subscription fees are a huge barrier to the purchase, I'm sure I'm not the only one thinking this. I'd appreciate a reply by Matt to this (annoying, I know) comment
lagoon,
It's actually much much worse than iMate is saying. If you are considering buying this frame, don't. I personally believe iMate intentionally oversold the features and price of the frame in a classic bait-and-switch. I am very unhappy with the company and particularly it's customer service.
Matt, I hope you're listening here.
Here's the whole story.
Before purchasing the Momento frame, I actually sent a question to iMate inquiring whether or not I could use the RSS feature without paying the subscription fee. I really don't understand the thinking the business people at iMate have gone through here - $300 for a picture frame and THEN $40 a month? So I asked anyway on the hope that it couldn't really be true.
To my surprise, I received the following response:
"Thank you for contacting Club i-mateTM Technical Support. Regarding your query, I would like to inform you that you can us Momento digital frame from an RSS feed (for example: Google)without the need to subscribe with Momento live."
Now this sounds great right? I went ahead and dished out the $300 to purchase the frame from Amazon. I have a new baby, and my Mom lives in another city, so I was excited that I had finally found such a great solution to giving her a hands-off way to see all my new photos.
Well the frame arrived, and it works flawlessly. I personally like it quite a lot, and I was able to set it up without a hitch, including reading pictures from my Picasa Web Album RSS stream. And it is here that the good news ends.
I won't bore you with any more of the details, here's a summary of my nearly two-week long exchange with their customer support in the most recent email I sent to iMate support:
--------------------------------------------
Please note that I am not simply trying to be difficult. Your answers have not been straightforward and are now conflicting with one another. Please review this thread at your convenience, you will find that on one occasion, I was told:
"Thank you for contacting club i-mate Technical Support. Regarding your query
please be informed that you need to renew your account to be able to use the
Momento Live service and RSS Picture stream."
And then I was told:
"all you need for RSS to work is a Momentolive.com account, a Momento frame and a wireless router with an internet connection. You can use a Mac browser like Safari or Firefox to go to www.momentolive.com and register your frame. From then on you can use the site to browse through RSS feeds and save them as Picture Streams, and then browse to them on your frame.
Next, I was told :
" Thank you for your e-mail of May 30, 2007. In addition to the first e-mail that was sent to you, please note that you will not be asked for a subscription fee unless you are using MOMENTO Live service. This means that as long as you have a Momentolive.com account and can access Internet on the device then you may not need the Momento Live service itself for the RSS feature to work. "
And then finally I was told:
" Thank you for your email of June 3, 2007. With regards to your query, please be informed that you do not need your momentolive.com account to use RSS feeds with your frame."
--------------------------------------------
The response I received from this was:
--------------------------------------------
"Regarding your query please be informed that pictures received from a RSS based source such as Flickr do not count as credits. One set-up via the MomentoLive web site, pictures are sent directly from the RSS source to the frame so bypass MomentoLive & so do not consume credits.
...
So please be rest assured that you can still be able to use your RSS feeds even if you are not subscribed with MomentoLive service and that message was just to remind you in case you want to subscribe with the service."
-------------------------------------
I knew there was one last nagging problem I figured was the catch (and it is. I responded with:
-------------------------------------
Thank you for the clarification. This brings me then to just one more question - after my free trial expires, does that mean I will no longer have the ability to modify which picture streams are accessible? When I setup my frame the only option I could see that enabled me to configure which picture streams to use were to use the momentolive.com account.
If it is possible to change picture streams after the free trial, please provide me with instructions on how to do so.
----------------------------
To which I received the following, final answer which I had been expecting all along:
----------------------------
Thank you for contacting clubimate on 5th of June, 2007. Regarding your query, please note that once the Trial period expires any RSS feeds that have been set up on your momentolive.com account can not be changed.
----------------------------
So how long does the trial last? If you don't use the free credits does the trial not expire. As I don't want to upload my photos to their service as I use flickr which works very well with my Nokia N95 with the cost of an MMS.
Thanks
gifster
I have one of these momento frames and have yet to get it to work with momento live. The people at i-mate are useless at customer service and keep telling me to reset the frame. It does not detect my Vista or XP Machine. It does not let me use the MMS function or email function. So the only way I can get pictures into it is with a memory stick or using www.momentolive.com which requires you to mess around uploading pics. I wanted a frame I could MMS so while I was on holiday I could send my gran so pics! What a waste of money and to top it off my Gran died before she got to see my holiday snaps because i-mate have no technical support on this product. below is an example of an email they sent me. Do they think I'm stupid??? Of course pictures were attached to the MMS.
Dear Valued Customer,
Thank you for contacting club i-mate Technical Support. Regarding your query please be advised to restore your device to the factory settings. You can do that by: Press MENU on your remote, then select Momento Settings->Frame->Restore to factory defaults. Please re try to send the pictures, and make sure they are attached to the message, and if you still face the same problem please contact us again.
That is unfortunate. I purchased the 7" model while I was in UK in June and it has worked fine. It took me some time setting it up to see my PC (in the end I had to reinstall my network on my Vista machine for the frame to recognise my PC, but I had to do that anyway for another reason) and it works great. I can email photos, mms photos or use the momentolive.com site to post photos. Within 15 minutes they are on the frame. Neat sideshow gimmick too all but the documentation was utter crap! You definately need to be somewhat PC literate to get it working fully as per the box bullet points but I like the frame overall.
How long until someone finally realises that screens like this are such a waste of screenage? Why do we not have WiFi enabled monitors? No need for physical connection to the base unit, widens the options available to home entertainment buyers, etc. Photos? Why not video. WiFi's fast enough, and if it's simply a video stream, how much processing power would it really take?
Not to harp on, but wouldn't it be nice to buy a new display, plug it in wherever you wanted, and hey-presto - PC display on the wall. Of the bathroom. Just above the toilet roll holder...
Regards
how do you get the thing to play MP3's
I had the hardest time connecting this thing to my Dlink DIR-655. They only offer email support and it is completely useless.
i documented the changes i had to make in order to make it connect: http://blog.sharpstyle.com/2007/10/26/i-mate-momento-and-dlink-dir-655-co-existence/.
hope this will save time for someone -- i spent a few hours trying to get it to work.
I really wanted to love the Momento frame, but there were just too many thinks wrong with it. Most of them could be solved with a software update, but by no means all of them.
Mine is going back to PCWorld.
http://blog.norman.cx/?p=19