For the holidays, my wife and I bought two i-mate Momento digital frames, one for each of our families; we were attracted to the frames because of their purported ability to use a wireless network connection to constantly receive updates from various photo-sharing services. In the end, trying to get the frames set up was painstaking, and the functionality was so broken as to leave us wondering whether the i-mate engineers put *any* thought into how the frames might actually be used in the real world.
Starting with the frame setup, one of the two frames we bought simply stopped working halfway through setup, hanging on a screen that might or might not have indicated that it was hunting for a wireless signal. I say "might or might not" because there's functionally no documentation for the frames, and there's also no realistic support (it's email-only and *incredibly* slow), so we never got an answer as to what might have been going on -- unfortunately, there was no way to bypass whatever it was doing, even after unplugging the frame and plugging it back in, so that frame was functionally dead.
Experimenting with the other frame, we succeeded in setting it up correctly -- a process that's pretty frustrating nonetheless, given that the only method provided for controlling the frame is with a somewhat-dodgy remote control. (I'd hate to think about what'd happen if/when a user loses the remote, since there really is no other way to control the frame.) Once connected and ready to show us its glory, we loaded a few pictures directly on the frame, and were reasonably happy with how they looked -- the screen itself is nice and bright, and it provides a full edge-to-edge viewing area that is relatively nice to look at.
Next, we decided to experiment with the online capabilities of the frame, since this was the primary reason we bought the Momento. We uploaded the same pictures both to Picasa and Flickr, and then used the online interface to tell our frame that we wanted it to pull pictures from the RSS feeds provided by each service. After a bit, the photos came into the screen, and this is where we were just stunned: the pictures had been resized to about 50% of their original size, leaving HUGE black borders around them on all sides. There was no way to have the frame show the images edge-to-edge, meaning that the nice, pretty display was only being about half-used and the images were small enough to be laughable. We played around with every setting we could think of to no avail, so in the end, we fired off a support email asking what we needed to do to enable the images to display full-screen. Two days later, we received the reply: this is the "intended behavior for displaying online images", and there's no way to get them displayed full-screen. That's right: the very same images that display full-screen when you load them directly onto the frame display HALF that size when they're pulled in from an online source, and there's no way to change that. After a few requests for clarification -- all of which had to take place via email, and all of which took 2-3 days to generate a reply -- we realized that i-mate just didn't understand the problem, and didn't care to provide a solution.
At this point, we realized that the i-mate Momento wasn't going to work out for us, given the lack of quality of the device and the obvious deficiencies in functionality. And with i-mate's questionable support procedures, there's no way we would put these into the hands of our much-less-technically-savvy parents; that would just be a recipe for disaster.
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