Count yourself lucky. In the US, a carrier-branded phone typically adds a bunch of unnecessary stuff like you mentioned AND removes or blocks anything that you could do with the phone to deprive the carrier of a money-making opportunity.

I bought a Nokia 5130 from T-Mobile and found that it wouldn't let me install Opera Mini OR the GMail app - but I could use their crappy browser that didn't work on anything and their "email" app that'd charge me a text message for every email read or sent.

Within one week I'd gotten sick of that and figured out how to flash the standard vanilla Nokia firmware onto it. It's a much better phone, now. (...of course, T-Mobile then had to go tell me that I'd have to pay $1.50 to get my bill each month, so that brought an end to that relationship real fast)

Easy: very dark room with the flash only triggered at the start or end of the exposure.

Pretty please!

Well, considering that I've seen the exact same comparison at BestBuy and Circuit City, I'd say, no, this is pretty clearly a Monster marketing-directed setup.

BestBuy's also got the habit of doing Blu-Ray vs. DVD comparisons with the DVD running over composite on a badly-adjusted set. I've gotten in the habit of reaching back there and plugging those RCA cables over into the Component inputs and "fixing" things while no blue-shirts are around. I just like to keep things fair.

But you notice them, which is entirely the point. I had LEDs on my last motorcycle (and will soon on my current one) because drivers behind me actually noticed when they came on, especially when I flick the brake a few times at the car coming up behind me at an intersection.

Back on topic, I think somebody needs to sell the home-end hardware for this so that the world can develop an entire network of animals to amuse.

Do any of these things support Plucker (.pdb) yet? That's my current favorite format for getting ebooks from Gutenberg.org and other sites.

Yep, I'm pretty sure that's what he's doing.

9.75" deep? Their product concept Photoshop job really took some liberties, there, with that flush-mounted look, eh?

Maybe having the rear of the TV sticking a few inches out into the adjoining room is considered the "easy maintenance" feature?

There's a big distinction between looking at a freeze-frame from a video vs. a compressed digital photograph.

I have a 40" 1080p television that I do some casual photo editing on. Believe me, the 6MP images from my DSLR look quite nice on that TV.

I think it'll look just fine, except for the glow of the backlight making it look very, um, TV-ee. That's pretty much the big drawback on all of these LCD picture frames: they don't look like a picture as, um, pictured, but like a bright monitor.

SilentPCReview has some pictures of this case with components installed that give a MUCH better idea of how this thing works than Antec's boring, empty press shots..