Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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22 of 24 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Poor customer service, November 7, 2007
This product works alright if you aren't running any wireless security (I had mixed results with WEP and WPA, currently I have it on a WEP network with linksys equipment and it is working ok).
The unit I got locked up out of the box due to a "memory stick media failure". There was no memory stick in the device. Tech support repeatedly asked me to unplug it and leave it off for at least 30 minutes, at which point it just got the same error. I got a memory stick (I have a camera that uses one) and after repeated jiggling finally got the error to clear and the frame works alright now, however I asked tech support several times for an RMA while I was fighting this problem and their response was negative. I could find no way to get tech support on the phone, and the email tech support seems to work from 4PM - midnight or something since that is when the responses come back.
Two of these frames I have gotten have had problems. The first thought it had a memory stick in it when it did not, and I had to return it. The second one worked ok. The third one will download messages, but will not download pictures. Still waiting for resolution on that one. Did I mention that their tech support is email only and awful?
If you get one of these and it is working out of the box and you don't have wireless problems, then probably things will work ok.
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17 of 19 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Nice product once you get past the glitches, December 11, 2007
I bought the eStarling for the wireless connect and web accessibility - a gift for out of town Grandparents who think the best use of a computer is to look at pictures of the grandkids. All they do is keep it plugged in and the wireless up - great concept and I think this product will do it. I'm running an older Linksys Wireless G Access Point WAP54G router using open security and MAC filtering and ran into none of the security issues others have mentioned.
A couple glitches to be aware of.... I initially connected the frame to a hardwired desktop PC (no wireless) running XP. The netconfig program that you download and run would not see my wireless networks. It appeared that the radio was not working. Manual setup did not work either. Customer support was worthless and kept talking about router compatibility. Eventually I tried setting up on my laptop (with wireless). It turns out that the netconfig program simply copies the wireless network table from the computer rather than actually searching for them, like Windows does. All the networks I have ever been connected to showed up in the list. I selected my wireless network and then everything worked fine.
The other odd thing that happened was when I initially plugged the frame into the desktop PC, it launched some Adobe Photoshop downloader software that must have been lying in the weeds on my PC. Somehow this Adobe software, which was now automatically starting when I logged in (i.e. little icon in the lower right corner of the screen), was somehow messing with my system's Multimedia Audio Controller. I had no sound or microphone. Once I un-installed the Adobe Photoshop Downloader, the sound came back. Go figure....
Like I said a few glitches.
I have been able to upload photos and even email them to the frame (that's pretty cool). However, the seeframe.com web site has been horrendously slow which makes the uploading tedious. I have yet to try Flickr. eStarling is on to something with this product, they just need to polish the documentation and beef up the web servers.
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19 of 23 people found the following review helpful:
1.0 out of 5 stars
The software kills the product, December 26, 2007
I bought this frame off of the estarling website. I normally don't write reviews, but I felt pretty strongly that other people should know what they're getting with this product since there aren't that many reviews out there.
Summary:
Pros - Looks nice, picture quality pretty good.
Cons - Expensive, no power button, website for managing frame is horrible, no button to refresh pictures from site, bad setup software, advertised features not implemented very well.
Hardware-wise, the frame looks quite nice, the image quality is pretty good -- at least as good as similarly sized frames that I have seen in stores. No complaints there. It would be nice if it had a power button.
The reason I bought this frame was so that I could set it up for my parents when I visited them over Christmas, then allow them to manage the photos wirelessly through the website. The best advertised feature, from my perspective, was the ability to email photos to the frame.
As a previous reviewer mentioned, you can not setup the frame to connect to your wireless network without a standalone computer. You download software from the seeframe website and connect the frame to your computer. The software scans wireless profiles on your computer and sends it to the frame. It will NOT scan for wireless networks on its own. This is somewhat annoying, but not a dealbreaker for me. It took me about an hour to get this working, b/c there are basically no diagnostic messages on the frame (wifi signal strength, what networks it sees, password wrong, etc..) I am usually really good with tech items so this is by no means as simple as it should be.
You have to register the frame with its unique registration code, and then set up an account on the see frame website. This is the "clearinghouse" for your photos. You can upload photos to this site, email photos to it through your seeframe email acct, connect rss feeds, and manage photos from here. Presumably, the frame periodically connects to the site and downloads the latest set of photos. There is no way that I can see where you can specify the refresh period, or to "force" a refresh. This kind of sucks since you just have to wait for some indeterminate time before you can start seeing photos that you've uploaded to the seeframe site.
Here is the really bad part -- the seeframe site is SUPER slow to update when you send photos by email and/or add photos to your rss feed. Case in point: I uploaded one photo each to my flickr and photobucket accounts over an hour ago (the corresponding rss feeds were already associated linked on my seeframe site). I forced a refresh and it said that the feed would reload in a couple of minutes. Those new photos still haven't appeared on my seeframe photos page.
Emailing photos is as slow, if not slower. I emailed myself a photo (< 1mb) last night at 7pm and received a notification at 3:26am that the photo had been received and was now on my seeframe site.
I can't understand the reason for the delay. I think there must be some poor intern at seeframe manually receiving these e-mails, stripping out the photo, then uploading it to the site and sending an e-mail confirmation. What else could explain the 6hr+ delay? Either automate it or hire some more interns, guys!!
You can also send text messages to the frame by writing them on the seeframe site. As far as I can tell, it seems to take about 20 minutes after you add the message for it to appear on your frame.
I am fairly disappointed with this purchase (on a scale of -1 to -10, it's probably a -9.5). The hardware is good, the idea is great, but if you want to use it for its wireless capabilities, then you will probably be disappointed too.
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