Product Reviews

With its Apple-like plastic styling, this digital picture frame looks exactly as you might expect a digital picture frame to look, but it does have the decency to cram in some less predictable features. First up, there's 802.11b/g WiFi, allowing you to load pictures from your PC over a wireless network. If you're running Windows Media Player 11 (whether in XP or Vista), it'll also integrate with the Media Sharing feature, picking up items in the library on any networked PC.

But it's only with Vista that you get Windows Sideshow. Using this, the Momento can act as a secondary display for your PC, receiving information from Sideshow Gadgets like RSS feeds, music information and email notifications.

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It's potentially a very powerful add-on to a device like this, but the current support on the Momento is hopeless: there's no documentation, many existing Gadgets fail to operate, and the ones that do don't show much useful information. Unless expanded by a future firmware upgrade, it's not something to brag about. The non-Sideshow date and time overlays are more useful.

As a basic picture display, the Momento does the job with panache. Aside from WiFi, it'll take USB devices such as portable hard disks or flash drives and most memory cards, and there's 32MB of onboard memory too. For £20 a year, you can sign up to momentolive.com, allowing you to email, text or upload photos which can then be fed to your picture frame.

The 10.2-inch 800 x 480 screen is bright, though photo buffs will lament its poor contrast and colour accuracy. For snaps, it's absolutely fine. There are loads of slideshow options built in (although it seems too slow to handle smooth fades), and skipping through your pics is easy using the remote, which is RF rather than infra-red so you don't need a clear line of sight.

It's the first digital picture frame that's really tempted us, but the Momento is pricey and feels as if it's still finding its way. A 7in version costs £100 less.