Way back at the start of the year I was talking about how the consoles, especially the Wii will do well because they can be used as part of a system that can be used as a digital photo frame (like the one that my wonderful wifey got me for Christmas). One thing that I somewhat over looked when I said that is that the mode that people are in when they are infront of their massive TV is far different than when they are in front of the bookshelf with the pictures of the family. The TV is the new way to be bored with vacation pictures – so if you are heading over to a friend’s place you can grab your SD card with the 500 shots of you and your doing what you will and “bore” them using the Wii or the PS3 or the whatever. But the photo frame is different; it’s smaller, more personal and in the background.
The inspriation for this post is an article in TR this morning about digital photo frames. Roush explores how these frames are the by product of the portable DVD and the sub laptop industry. These devices allow the ever increasing number of images captured (I shot about 400 over the weekend alone) to at least see the light of day and not be confined to some storage device (the article mentions memory cards and I know for a fact that there are people who buy memory as if it were film – some of these don’t know better, others do it because they want “durable storage, not trusting platters or optical media).
These, combined with phones (if they use phone batteries for the frames, I’ll bet you they would get more popular, or if they were “solar” powered), the days of having only one image in a frame on the shelf or carrying your family picture in your wallet are starting to come to a close as we see multiple, moving or even interactive (ala Harry Potter via MS’s Photo Synth technology) images lining our shelves. Heck, I think the wallet is going to go soon as the various easy pay systems are eventually all embeded into phones (though I think that will take a while as right now, at least in Canada, easy payment systems are controlled by the gas companies, but if we look to Japan, there is hope there).
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