Comments on: Review of i-mate Momento 100 photo frame

By: Doug

Doug — Sun, 08 Feb 2009 03:52:49 +0000

…
Presumably if i-mate went bust or pulled out of the photo frame market the momentolive.com site would cease to exist and most of the Wifi features of their frames would stop working.
…..

How prophetic – February 25, 2009 is the date.

By: Glenn

Glenn — Tue, 25 Nov 2008 22:36:04 +0000

Totally agree; this frame sucks! I’ve just got one as a birthday present 3 days ago, and it has lost the memory of the remote 5 times. Currently it seems that the connection can not be restored – I have tried 10 times over the last hours – so I will return it in the shop tomorrow!

CONCLUSION: DONT’T EVEN CONSIDER BUYING A MOMENTO WIFI FRAME (UNLESS YOU REALLY ENJOY FRUSTRATIONS).

By: andy

andy — Tue, 16 Sep 2008 09:01:23 +0000

Jon:

You just need to find yourself one of the many hundreds of applications designed for making thumbnails of images. Not that I expect it to help much, unless you have a frame with an updated firmware or something.

By: Jon

Jon — Fri, 12 Sep 2008 17:14:53 +0000

I have one of these units and can confirm that browsing through digital camera images is slow. I haven’t tried this, but if you downscale all your images to the dimensions of the screen, I reckon it will zip along. The CPU in these devices will not be very powerful, but resampling a 5MP+ image does take quite a bit of processing power to do. Hence the speed! This will be a problem on all similar devices, I suspect.

I imagine it will be possible to do a “bulk convert” with a utility – ImageReady/Photoshop does this I seem to remember – but using a free, built-for-purpose application. I will have a look for one, someone must have developed one already…

By: andy

andy — Tue, 22 Apr 2008 05:33:45 +0000

You are right, I don’t have the frame anymore so I’m afraid I can’t help with the firmware version.

I bought the Kodak EX1011 in the end, one for my parents and one for me. While in many ways it is better than the iMate it still has many really annoying issues, some of which could be easily solved.

The top issue being the complete lack of any way of playing photos in a random order.

The wifi side of the Kodak also has so many issues that both frames are instead just being used with a memory card instead.

By: Rob Guth

Rob Guth — Tue, 22 Apr 2008 03:30:57 +0000

I tend to agree with most of your observations and I have had my fair share of other issues with the frame and MomentoLive. I will have to say that I found my frame not to have the issue with color depth that you describe. It sounds like you don’t have the frame anymore, but it would have been worth a note about the firmware level. I purchased my Momento about 2 weeks ago. If I *ever* get a response from momentosupport@imate.com on how to get/update the firmware I’ll be sure to post a follow up. Customer support for this frame is non existent!

I have an eStarling wireless frame (ThinkGeek) that addresses most of the issues that you mentioned. Especially those concerning rotating images from the wireless connection along with memory card and frame memory. The eStarling site (seeframe.com) isn’t a thing of beauty but once you get the hang of it, it’s not bad to navigate and set up. It doesn’t require people to create accounts just to send pictures (this is really a stupid design…) you just authorize a list of email addresses that are allowed.

I’m still deciding if I can send the Momento to my mom for Mother’s Day and not have to worry about weekly tech support calls from her telling me the frame is ’stuck’ or not working.

Thanks for your comprehensive review.

By: Alfred

Alfred — Sat, 05 Apr 2008 14:03:44 +0000

Thanks Andy for your review – very accurate. I actually bought one of these this past week thinking that it is ideal for remote updates of photos to a location where I did not want to leave the remote. However as you point out without the remote, it is pretty useless. Also, photos I send only takes up a section of the screen which is annoying. I am wondering how you are able to display Flickr RSS feeds as the momentolive.com website seems to reject url that are not xml files. I would be interested in trying that.

Thanks in advance!

By: Alex

Alex — Tue, 19 Feb 2008 01:58:59 +0000

Brilliant review!

I am so glad I did a google search before purchasing a discounted unit off woot.com.

I look forward to the wifi digital frame era, but am dismayed at how far short this particular frame has fallen.

Hopefully your review falls into the right hands and a better user interface and funcationality are developed!

Thanks again for saving me headache and money!

By: David Watson

David Watson — Wed, 30 Jan 2008 03:29:58 +0000

Thanks for the review. I agree with a lot of your criticisms, especially about the UI, but I have had a much better overall experience. I bought this as a birthday present for my wife and she loves it. We don’t use the internet functions, but we use wifi to access our vast photo library on our network server. For this purpose, I find it works quite well.

By: andy

andy — Wed, 05 Dec 2007 18:10:37 +0000

I had seen that review and noticed it was largely based on an older firmware version, so I am willing to give it a try.

Thanks to the Distance Selling Regulations it is largely cost and risk free to try out stuff from reputable online stores…