![]() The gadget looks nice enough - and it was plenty unobtrusive, thanks to its location and translucence - but again, until more useful gadgets start hitting the pipeline, we're lukewarm on the feature. We enabled the Media Player one from the PC's control panel, and away we went. Besides the four gadgets offered up from Microsoft's gallery, Vista rocks two out of the box: a Windows Mail gadget and a Media Player playlist gadget. Installing the Momento as a SideShow-compatible secondary display on our PC was simple enough (though poorly documented) and involved downloading a driver from i-mate's site. Will they come eventually? Yeah, maybe - if SideShow takes off - but in the meantime, it's little more than a novelty. No weather gadgets, no traffic gadgets, no nifty performance meters to monitor our PCs remotely. What we didn't realize before installing the frame was that SideShow gadgets are totally different beasts from Sidebar gadgets - they're not interchangeable - and while Microsoft's Sidebar gadget site is flush with interesting new gadgets, the equivalent site for SideShow gadgets shows an anemic four: Stocks (currently in beta), Web Pictures, Picture Viewer (also in beta), and a simple RSS viewer. Imagine our disappointment, then, at the utter dearth of SideShow gadgets in the wild. Sure, it's cool to be able to glance at photos out of your album and even cooler to get streamed new photos from friends and family, but overlaying useful information on the display should really take the device to a new level. ![]() We kinda think i-mate is missing the boat here - SideShow holds the promise of turning digital picture frames from minimally functional entertainment devices with little practical function into seamless extensions of our desktop PCs. There's no mention of the support in the frame's terse manual, and it's mentioned only in passing on i-mate's website. The most intriguing feature of the Momento is one that seems almost played down by i-mate: support for Microsoft SideShow. Anyway, we eventually discovered that the Momento was totally not cool with our Netgear WAG102's WPA / WPA2 hybrid functionality setting it to pure WPA (and frustratingly changing all our existing devices to use WPA) cleared the issue right up and the frame happily connected. Next we tried using the frame's USB port to load wireless settings via Windows Connect Now - which it allegedly supports - but were repeatedly issued an error that the USB drive couldn't be read. We were able to freeze it this way again and again the option simply doesn't work (ah, the joys of early firmware revisions!). This time, instead of entering the WPA key, we selected the "Use existing settings" option, which froze the unit. We knew that wasn't the case, so we rebooted and selected the network again. The Momento happily accepted it, even, and proceeded to the next screen where we were told no Windows Media Connect systems were found on the network. The madness began when we fired up the frame for the first time it detected our 802.11g network right away and prompted us to enter the WPA key. ![]() We eventually got it working, but only long after we suspect the average consumer would've given up and packed it for return. Does the unit deliver on its promise as a highly connected, Vista-compatible accessory? Does it deliver as a plain ol' frame, for that matter? We took the $200 Momento 70 - the smaller of the two, clocking in at 7 inches of diagonal real estate - for a test drive to get some answers.įor us, setting up the Momento's WiFi connectivity was an exercise in frustration. In that respect, the Momento is very much a first-generation device - but as a picture frame, we came into the hands-on expecting a certain level of refinement, now that they've had a few years to ripen on the vine. Next up, the Momento is among the very first commercially available devices to support Microsoft's SideShow concept for secondary displays that should (theoretically, anyway) untether all manner of information from the PCs on which it typically resides. First of all, they do WiFi - a seemingly obvious feature for this category of devices that's inexplicably missing from a majority of the mainstream models currently in the marketplace. Thrown together by well-traveled ODM Inventec, i-mate's new Momento series of digital picture frames break some important ground.
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