Gadget Love: Display your affection with a digital photo frame
Get creative with your Valentine's present this year and load up a digital photo frame with your favourite romantic snaps
If you would like to add a touch of creative flair to your Valentine's present, but have exhausted your supplies of sticky-backed plastic, a digital photo frame could be your answer.
Quick and easy to setup, they can be customised to display classic memories: your holiday last year, that lovely autumn walk in the park, that time you dressed up as Superwoman for your nephew's fancy dress party...
There are many frames on the market, but if quick and easy are your two top criteria, your best bet is the Photo Viewer from Parrot (£119). This nifty little frame (pictured right) receives images via Bluetooth -- simply load it up wirelessly with photos from your phone, PDA or PC, and your thoughtful gift is ready to go.
The Parrot Photo Viewer can store around 100 photos, boasts a small but perfectly formed 320x234-pixel TFT display and comes in a range of styles, including wood and our favourite, Valentine's-red leather. But before you snap one up, beware: turn your back for a second and mischievous Bluetooth-enabled mates will have no problems hijacking the display, so prepare yourself for stitch-ups.
If you're romancing the sort of person who prefers a manual-driven roadster to an automatic Mini, the 9-inch Philips Digital Photo Frame (£200, pictured left) is probably more up their alley. It's solid and stylish, with a large, 680x480-pixel display, and the accompanying Philips' Photo Manager software gives you control over your images before they get to the frame. You can create and manage albums using images from your hard drive or memory cards and add transition effects to your slideshows.
Once they are loaded on to your frame, you can also adjust the individual images. You have the option to zoom, crop, rotate and add colour effects --such as black and white and sepia -- and digital frames.
The Digital Photo Frame has interchangeable surrounds, so you can kit it out to match your décor, or again choose red for romance. The joystick control on the back is a tad fiddly, but otherwise this is a classy frame that has no problem displaying signs of affection on 14 February. -KM