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Provides: Digital picture display
Developer: IPEVO
Minimum Requirements: Mac OS X 10.5+, 802.11 b/g network, or images on SD/USB, or a USB connection
Price: $149.99
Availability: Now

IPEVO’s Kaleido picture frame is surely a step ahead of the rest as far as digital picture frames go. Sure, it displays your pictures, but what digital picture frame doesn’t? It has to do more than that to stand out, and you guessed it, it does. What’s so unique about the Kaleido R7 is that it can be filled with images over your home’s wireless network. It can even get them on its own from the Internet without you lifting a finger.

The Kaleido R7 comes with all the standard stuff.  You have the power cable, the remote, and the frame itself.  Once you’ve unboxed this little guy, you’ll notice just how well made it really is.  It feels quite sturdy to the touch; you won’t be thinking you just purchased some cheap plastic display.  It’s halfway to a true Apple product in that it’s almost free of physical buttons.  Nearly all of the controls on the device itself are touch sensitive buttons, but most of the controlling happens from the remote; it’s just easier.  The display itself is quite crisp.  It doesn’t suffer from what I like to call large pixel syndrome.  Some, mainly cheaper, digital picture frames suffer from absurdly large pixels as a result of super low resolutions.  The Kaleido R7 has a 7 inch display with a resolution of 800 by 480; plenty for great image quality.

One of the coolest features of the frame is how it swivels from landscape to portrait orientation.  You’ll likely just want to keep it in the orientation of the majority of your images, which may or may not change from one set of pictures to the next.  The option is great to have, but I must admit that I never deviate from landscape since I’m in love with the widescreen format in general and don’t mind the black bars that sometimes happen from my poor choice in picture layouts in the past.

So a wireless picture frame…it’s probably about as easy to set up as a solid colored jigsaw puzzle right?  Set up is actually quite easy, and that’s something I wasn’t quite expecting.  All you have to do is plug in the picture frame, type in your network details (name and password) and install the app onto your Mac.  The app will request that you pair the frame with it, so do that as well.  That’s pretty much it.  Now you have the freedom to select pictures from your computer and have them loaded, wirelessly, to the frame’s 512MB of internal memory.  Of course, it does all the standard stuff as well, like read pictures from an SD card or USB drive, but you’d have to expect that.  Pictures may also be loaded by connecting the frame to your Mac with a USB cable, but why would you want wires when you can use your network?  Heck, the darn thing can be on a different floor in your house. It’s the ultimate in convenience.

It’s alright, you can take a while. I realize it’s awesome.

Back? Okay. Now how are you going to use that wireless connection more? One of the most unique features of the frame is something IPEVO calls Live Channels.  These are automatically updating photo (or news) feeds.  This means you can load pictures from Facebook, Flickr, iPhoto or any RSS enabled feed (even just text feeds) and see them on your Kaleido without even touching it.  The catch?  The desktop app feeds the frame with the pictures from the Internet, not the frame itself.  That means it has to be running on a Mac on the same network as the frame for the Live Channels to work.  Of course, you can always view saved images, so just make sure you have some good pics to fall back on in case the app is unavailable for any reason.  And since you are in your house viewing the frame, it’s very likely that you also have a Mac capable of running the app with you.  I’m just not a fan of unnecessary apps cluttering up my desktop.  I’m really hoping that this app could be converted to a preference pane or other background process.

But wait! There’s more! The app is also available for iPhone and iPod touch free of charge. It’s called EyeStage.

The iPhone version of the app might seem pointless at first, but I’ve had some time to play with it, and I’ve found a number of cool and useful things about it.  First off, you can use the app just like the frame itself.  It will pull pictures from the Net just like the desktop app, and it uses that beautiful iPhone screen you have like another miniature Kaleido.  And if you have an iPhone stand, this might be a good way to put it to use.  You could, of course, do something similar with Apple’s Photo app, but EyeStage has some really nice photo transitions, and it will display those Live Channels we talked about before.

EyeStage for iPhone will even pair with the Kaleido frame, in place of the desktop app.  I wouldn’t recommend it though, since Live Channels will basically be unavailable to you.  At least, they won’t be “Live.”  You can always just download the feed as currently available to the app and update it manually the next time there are new pictures. I know, not ideal.

I really do like the app.  It’s definitely one of the best available on the App Store for displaying pictures on your iDevice.  It’s free, and if you haven’t already realized it, you don’t need a Kaleido to get some use out of it.

I feel that the Kaleido is one of the best digital picture frames I’ve seen.  It can be loaded with all of your pictures over the air using your existing home network.  It has enough internal memory to store tons of images, and with the included software, you can stream endless amounts of auto updating feeds straight to it.  The only thing I’m left wanting is support for video. I blame Harry Potter. Nevertheless, you’ll love the Kaleido R7; it’s money well spent.