Ipevo CEO Royce Hong and I have something in common: we hate digital photo frames.
In his words, digital photo frames so far have been expensive, with poor design, a difficult user interface, and poor image resolution. I have to agree. But the Ipevo Kaleido R7, which his company created, tries to tackle these concerns.
First, there's no need for an SD card. The device uses Wi-Fi to get photos directly from your PC's hard drive, or from a photo-sharing service like Picasa or Flickr. Or, with the 512MB of memory included in the frame, up to 5,000 photos can be stored on it. The Kaleido also comes with a remote control and software that allows you to organize your photos into channels or playlists, and then schedule what pictures are rotated through the display, and when.
The display itself looks a bit like Sony's XEL-1 OLED TV--sans the thinness. It's a 7-inch horizontal frame with 800x480 resolution that stands on a single foot. Along the base of the frame are touch-responsive buttons that will scroll through photos, pause, reverse, and flip channels, or photo playlists.
The Kaleido isn't stuck showing just landscape-style photos, however. The frame can also be rotated to a vertical orientation.
The frame will ship with its own Mac- and PC-compatible software, which Hong describes as "iTunes for photos." The aesthetic is similar to the Apple music software, but doesn't connect to an online store like iTunes.
The Kaleido R7 doesn't have a final price yet, but will be somewhere between $199 and $249 when it debuts officially at CES in January.