Hey, if you can take Google's open source OS for mobile telephones and chunk it into a netbook, then why not
digital photo frames? Fujitsu and Japan's Macnica have teamed up on what they're calling a "Software Platform for Home Network Digital Photo Frames" based on Google's Android. In other words, it's a software platform for home network digital photo frames based on Google's Android. Uh, riiight. The prototype frame above was on display in Japan yesterday running slideshows off a standard
DLNA network. Honestly, we don't care what OS is running at the core of those cheap, off-brand digital photo frames cluttering big box shelves every holiday -- just make the navigation intuitive and we're happy. Android seems like a good (and free!) start along the road to standardization.
posted May 14th 2009 5:41AM
Quite.
But how is Android going to accidentally infect users with viruses? This will NEV4R work!
...
Might as well stick a phone on the wall.
Or a netbook.
if I can pick up a $69.99 digi frame running android and then install whatever the hell mini linux widgets I want. then that's far better than a $300 netbook duct taped to the wall, and clearly far better than showing photos of my dog in a slideshow.
a networked frame than can be programmed to display emails, weather, etc for cheap.
you people should be all over this.
Digital frames are for total noobs. For whom double clicking on a picture is too complicated or too much work.
Hopefully, it has a touch screen & can run most/all of the apps in the Android Market. THAT would be cool!
Hopefully this will mean that more photo frames will support the feature of being able to email images to them (without having to sign up to any $10/mth service!). That's the key thing I'd like to see so that I can simply send pictures to my relatives and have them pop up on the display without the need to transfer them across from a computer.
You can. FrameChannel.com is free, and works as far as I know at least with Kodak WiFi frames, probably others too. I send photos as an attachment to an e-mail and they pop up 2 seconds later on my mums frame.
You can do that today with any frame that supports Media RSS. See http://ourdoings.com/
Uhmm, you might be missing the point here. Having the photo frame run Android suddenly means you could have a web browser and installable apps on a touchscreen computer sitting in your living room coffee table or your kitchen counter. Way better than a plain-ol' photo frame? Methinks so.
If it can run all Android apps, I could:
put one in my kitchen for reading recipes off of the web, or off of my food related RSS feeds.
put one in my room, to use as a Google Calendar sync'ed alarm clock
put one next to my couch for quick/dirty IMDB lookups, product lookups, etc., while I'm watching TV/movies/etc.
Hopefully it'll have decent physical UI elements (touchscreen for use with cupcake's virtual keyboard; dpad, menu button, back button, and home button for basic android navigation).