Digital frame targets kitchen

By John Mello on March 14, 2008 6:18 PM

While personal computer makers enviously eye the Great American Living Room as a lucrative market for their products, the leading maker of digital picture frames in the United States is focusing on another part of the house for its latest computainment offering: the kitchen. Pandigital, of Dublin, Calif., will begin demonstrating next week at the International Home & Housewares Show in Chicago a 15-inch, 1280-by-720-pixel LCD display that's a combination HDTV, electronic cookbook and digital picture frame.

The unit, which is priced at $399.99, can be mounted under the cabinets in a kitchen or on a wall. It also has a stand for display on a countertop. What's more, because the screen is sealed behind glass, it can avert damage from kitchen perils like water, flour and oil. In addition, the frame has interchangeable face plates in brushed stainless, black or white to match most kitchen decors.

An electronic cookbook is pre-loaded into the display's 512 megabytes of memory and more recipes can be loaded into the device through memory cards. In the same way, digital snapshots can be pumped into the frame or they can be downloaded into the gadget from Google's Picasa photo site. A six-in-one digital card reader is incorporated into the frame, which supports SD, XD, Memory Stick, Memory Stick Pro/Memory Stick Duo, Compact Flash and MMC media.

A built-in calendar and clock can be used to program the frame to play content at appointed times, as well as set reminder alarms.

The unit's functions can be accessed through touchscreen controls or a remote, which can be stored behind the frame where it won't be misplaced.

“As the hub of today’s busy home, the kitchen is now incorporating new technologies that have already been embraced in other areas of the home and office,” Pandigital CEO Dean Finnegan said in a statement. “The Pandigital Kitchen HDTV/Digital Cookbook/Digital Photo Frame addresses this new demand with the convergence of three key technologies into a single product.”

That sounds good to me, but Pandigital has got to change the name of this thing. The "HDTV/Digital Cookbook/Digital Photo Frame" moniker is a real yawner.