HP sd828a1 8-Inch Smart WiFi digital Photo Frame
Price: $149.99
Product Features:
- With True Enhanced Performance.
- Latest Technical Development.
Product Description
The HP 8-Inch Smart Wi-Fi Display is a full-featured wireless digital picture frame that lets you quickly and easily access digital content on the frame, on the Internet or on a home server or PC. It lets you enjoy and share photos from online photo sharing sites, access popular social networking sites, listen to Internet radio and receive information such as headline news and weather forecasts. The HP Smart Wi-Fi Display is a smart choice for personal use or as a gift to your loved ones. Built-in wireless connectivity: Lets you connect to the Internet and your home network; Lets you view your photo collection or stream video and music from your home media server or PC; Online photo sharing sites and social website access: Enjoy and share photo albums from your favorite photo sharing websites such as Snapfish, Photobucket, Flickr, and Picasa; Enjoy and share photo albums from your favorite social networking websites such as Facebook, MySpace, and morel; Get real-time notification when friends & families update their albums or when new photos are available; View latest video from your favorite people on YouTube; Internet radio and Internet gadgetView real-time weather condition in your area: Receive the latest Tweets from your friends; At the touch of a finger, listen to your favorite Internet radio stations; Customizable user interfaceEasy one-time setup on a PC allows you to pick and choose exactly what service to receive and how the user interface looks from various skins/backgrounds. You can also create your own playlist for photos, video and music from your collection: MMS photos: Send photos directly to your HP Smart Wi-Fi Display from your mobile phone;Digital Picture Frame functions: A feature-rich digital picture frame lets you browse through your photo collection online or offline. Now, you can share and receive pictures directly to your frame from family and friends. You can also view slideshows of your pictures while playing your favorite music
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I bought this frame as a gift for my mother so she could display photos of my daughter. I realized that any frame where she had to manually update the photos on the frame would likely become an unused brick unless if I continually mailed her updated flash drives. I selected this frame because of its integration with flickr and the capability for me to use a website to do the necessary updates to display new photos from flickr.
This frame was very easy to setup. I turned it on and it detected my wireless network. I entered the password (I have WPA2 security BTW) and I was on the frame. The next step was to use a computer to go to [...] and sign up for an account. I set up an account for my mother and was able to quickly get multiple flickr accounts activated for the frame. I selected which albums (sets) to make available to the frame. One gripe is that the albums appear on the frame in an apparently random order. Once the albums are activated for use on the frame, you can view them seconds later on the frame. As another reviewer mentioned, you cannot display more than one album at a time. Also, I will need to log on to my mother’s hpframe account (on the web) to activate any new albums I add to flickr (they are not automatically updated). However, if I were to add photos to an existing set on flickr they would automatically be included when my mother viewed the album on the frame.
I also set up internet radio. The search interface is clunky, but I selected a station (KEXP) to play and almost instantly it was playing. The internet radio continues to play in the background as I navigate around the frame. The sound is ok, but I’m not an audiophile and I don’t expect a picture frame to replace a stereo.
I also set up the weather gadget that shows the present conditions and 3 day forecast for up to 3 locations. Youtube setup was easy and playback was smooth. You can connect to your account so you can watch videos that you have uploaded. You also can browse through different categories (Comedy, Music, News, etc) and view the top-rated or most videos for those categories.
Finally, I enabled the ability to email photos to the frame. You enter an email address, which receives instructions on how to send an email to the frame (basically you just attach a photo to the frame’s assigned email address and then you can navigate to the folder on the frame to display it). An icon in the corner of the frame indicates that you have a new photo. This email worked for the first photo I sent, but not the second, so there may be some bugs. It’s also not clear how to delete these emailed photos from the frame, and emailing photos will still require my mother to find the emailed photos section of the frame.
I also briefly connected to my home computer through Windows Media Player 11 to view videos and photos and it seemed to work.
I have not connected the frame to a computer to do a mass download of photos, but it appears this is done by connecting a USB cable between the frame and computer and then dropping and dragging folders to the frame.
Putting in a memory card to the back of the frame automatically starts a slide show. By selecting the settings button on the remote you can access a menu that lets you choose different slide show options (how long a photo displays, single photo or four photos, etc) and also copy a picture down to the internal memory of the frame (this works for flickr albums too!). When playing a slideshow you can pause by hitting the pause button on the remote. Unfortunately a little pause icon appears and stays on the screen.
The frame is primarily controlled by a remote with 18 buttons on it, all with a picture icon. It takes some getting used to, and sometimes there seems to be some lag between touching a button and the frame reacting. There are some buttons on the back of the frame to control it that way, but that would get pretty awkward and old quickly.
Finally, I’m not a fan of the physical frame. It’s plastic, and obviously plastic, and has a weird wave shape to it. Classy it is not. The actual display seems nice. One last quibble is that the power cord seems short.
Overall, I think this frame will work well for my mother and allow her to relatively easily view new photos that I post on flickr. There are some annoying quirks (only being able to view one album/folder/set at a time, the pause button displaying if I want to just see one photo and not a slideshow, the occasional slowness of the remote) and the actual frame is a bit cheesy and plasticky.
First and foremost, I haven’t really used much of the Wi-Fi functions on this frame with the exception of synching up with Photobucket and that seemed to work decent enough. The main reason for buying this was it seemed much easier to upload pic files from a PC via USB whereas most of the other digital frames are geared more for using memory cards/sticks and for just transferring pics from a digital camera. Connecting with the USB cable seemed simple enough when it was initially hooked up and a few files were transferred, but the next day the PC wouldn’t recognize the frame when it was hooked up. So I had to spend hours tweeking the thing to get my PC to recognizing it again. Once that was done and I was able to load up some jpeg and mp3 files is where the real problem began. With less than 800 jpeg files and a handful of mp3 files the drive was full which seemed kind of odd for a frame that supposedly has 512MB for memory, but whatever..fair enough. The problem is once all the photos were on there accessing them was significantly problematic. Clicking on the “All Photos” button from the Internal Memory section continually got me an error message telling me the database was busy and I had to access the photos via the folders section. Well the folders section only lists a small percentage of the photos on the drive and even then it is difficult to access them as clicking on any individual photo repeatedly sometimes still wouldn’t bring it up on the display. When pics did come up the display quality was pretty nice. The sound quality is less than impressive when playing MP3s so I can only assume it would be the same if you’re accessing internet radio stations as well. Again I realize I was only purchasing this for limited functions that others may not care about, but if a product has this many flaws on just things I care about I’m guessing they’ll carry over to other aspects of the device as well.
Like many others, I bought this HP digital frame as a gift. The main selling point was the WiFi capability that allows the frame to receive photos directly by email, text message, or photo sharing sites.
Unfortunately, the HP “Smart” digital frame is anything but.
We have spent several days trying to set-up the HP frame and getting it to work. Sadly, it does not work well at all.
You register your frame at the HP website in order to enable features such as weather, photos by email, etc. Herein lies the first big problem. Every time you choose “Set-up” on the frame (even to check previous settings), you are forced to generate new authentication codes to associate the frame with your website account. This is very frustrating and inconvenient.
The same thing happens with setting up the wireless network — if you go into the setup menu, the previously connected wireless network is removed and you are forced to re-enter your wireless settings. (Which can be a pain if you have to remember generated passwords/keys from your wireless router.)
After all the countless false starts and re-entering settings, we tried emailing photos to our newly registered frame. At the HP website, you authorize email addresses and cell phone numbers that can send photos to your frame. Those addresses receive an automated email with the frame’s unique email address. We tried sending photos to the frame, but it did not work. THE EMAILS SENT TO THE FRAME FAILED AND BOUNCED BACK. All the emails sent to the frame were returned to the sender with a “Mailbox Full” error message. Apparently the company HP hired to maintain the email gateway to the frame is not reliable.
A few days later, we were finally able to get photos sent to the frame via email. (Apparently HP corrected their “full mailbox” problem? Which suggests the same problem could happen at any time again in the future.) So, great, the frame is finally receiving photos. Unfortunately, the menu on the frame that allows you to receive those emailed photos does not work properly. (For some reason HP divides all the types of content between a confusing set of menu areas.) Emailed photos cannot be deleted off the frame and you are not able to select an emailed photo directly in order to copy it to a memory card, the frame’s internal memory, etc. This seems to defeat the purpose of the receiving photos by email or text message.
Unfortunately, it seems every other aspect of this frame has problems or does not work as advertised. Menus are so slow you never know if the keys pressed on the included remote are working or not. The “Weather” function depicted on the packaging shows a large weather map — the actual Weather function on the frame does not show any map or graphics whatsoever. The frame body itself looks less like a photo frame (it is black/grey with a curve in the body) and more like a small tablet PC, which isn’t necessarily appealing if you want the look of a traditional picture frame.
Finally, the worst problem of all is the frame does not automatically start playing a slide show when you turn it on. (!?) Every digital frame manufactured is only required to do one thing: Start a slideshow of photos whenever it is turned on. The HP frame does not do that. The documentation says that the frame will only start an automatic slide show if there is a media card inserted full of photos. If the frame only contains photos on it’s internal memory or in the “Emailed/MMS photos” section, it will not play a slide show automatically. Worse still, we inserted a Compact Flash card full of photos and the frame still will not start slideshows reliably.
We tried contacting HP Customer Service about these problems. When we talked to the call center in India, we were told they could not help us, and were given other HP numbers to call, which, surprise, when we tried calling we ended up back in the very same call center in India. An endless loop of no help. We also tried emailing HP customer service, but never received any response, even days later.
I don’t understand why HP would produce a product that works so poorly (and not as advertised) and not even offer any kind of customer service help whatsoever.
Right out of the box it refused to communicate with my wifi network which uses the secure WPA2. After 3 hours of messing with it I decided to change my router to WEP and it finally connected and download itself a new firmware version.
Well, it’s all over the internet that the WEP is not secure , so I changed again
to WPA2, and the problems started . The connection to DHCP would fail most of the time or it would freeze while showing picture from Picassa website and trying to play radio station at the same time. Before buying this item see if HP decided to added the support on its own web site, for my surprise I couldn’t find this device listed there at all, I called HP and their advise was to reset the router….What a pit! This device has good specs, if would just work….
At least buy.com was very friendly to accept it back and provided a shipping label.
The frame can access all the popular photo sites, but it does not allow you to have the pictures automatically do a slideshow. I wanted a frame to send to my parents that all the kids could just upload pictures to a website and then they would show up on the frame. The user has to navigate to the picasa, facebook, etc. page and select individual folders to view them one at a time. My parents can do that from their computer. Also, the frame displays little icons for the various websites it supports in the corner. I don’t want to see website logos in the corners of all my pictures. I returned the frame and am shopping for another.