I am currently helping Satheesh source for digital photoframes which allows for touchscreen as well as open API programming. Apparently after exhausting all the search results over Google, I realize there are actually none in the market. Ouch!
It seems while smaller gadgets like Iphone and the Android phone offer these functions, most currently existing gadgets don’t. I suddenly got me thinking, what is the possibility of assembling one such hardware, the corresponding operating system and the specific software that allows this functionality.
Perhaps Google or Microsoft might discover this as an interesting untapped market and build a light operating system for this. Then again perhaps not, in the case of Google.
I think the installation of a Linux box on such a system might work. Then again it leaves me thinking of the hardware aspects of it. Well that really is foreign territory then.
I just did the same google search, and got the same results. Any movement on this, to your knowledge?
This is an opportunity waiting to happen for someone with marketting skills and the right hardware and software connections. The application software will practically write itself, i imagine, given the right API and number of people that would jump on it.
How many techie folks have an iPhone or Blackberry, and a partner at home that is using a paper calendar on the fridge while the computer is sitting right there? How many techie photography folks spend hours organizing a detailed picture library with dates and tags and events, only to be dissapointed that the latest frame doesn’t support search or “sort by” capabilities, while thier partner complains that the physical photo albums are sorely out of date. This (your proposal) is another device that bridges the digital and tangible worlds, and limiting it to JUST a non-programmable photoframe makes absoluetely no sense to me.
Put the hardware out there with the open API / OS and see what magic happens.