eStarling ImpactV Digital Photo Frame

Here's an interesting product. Let's say you are at your daughter's birthday party and she's turning six. Using your cell phone, you can take a quick video of your daughter blowing out the candles. You can then immediately send that video to your mom's ImpactV digital photo frame, which might be sitting in her living room on the other side of the country or on the other side of the world. With no action on her part, and no wires or cables involved, the video magically appears on her ImpactV.

That's really cool.

You can do the same thing with photos. Photos take a minute or so to arrive at the frame. Videos take a bit longer, sometimes as much as twenty minutes for larger video clips. The maximum length for a video clip is 4 minutes, so you can't send Batman Returns or anything crazy like that. Mind you, the frame does play DVD-quality video with high quality sound.

Still, you can send those funny video clips on YouTube to your ImpactV frame. You can send all sorts of video for that matter... movie trailers, news clips, music videos, friends and family videos, instructional videos or sports highlights video clips. We can think of a million ways past cool that this product will make for the best Mother's Day gift money can buy.

In addition to handling video clips, the eStarling ImpactV (the V stands for Video) can do everything that the eStarling photo frames - the 7" Impact7 ($99.99) and the 8" Impact8 ($169.99) -- can do.

That means you can schedule photos and/or videos to appear on your frame on whatever day/time you specify. You can subscribe to RSS photo feeds and video feeds to automatically get new content on your frame. There are a ton of great video feeds to subscribe to...everything from the videos at USAToday to YouTube videos to Comedy Central videos to ESPN sports video feeds.

If you've collected digital photos or videos in a variety of online places (Flickr, Photobucket, etc.), eStarling provides a single website that you can login to and manage all those photo assets. (The originals can be securely stored at Photobucket via a partnership between eStarling and Photobucket.) Without a solution like the eStarling ImpactV, your vast collection of images and videos will typically sit on a server somewhere, wasting away and never being viewed by anybody.

There are other tricks you can do with the frame... and it's a long list. You can connect your ImpactV Facebook account. Put your Facebook credentials into your eStarling web account and photos from your Facebook friends will automatically start appearing on your eStarling photo frame. This is an exciting evolution in furniture... furniture that actually reaches out to you and proactively helps you to socialize with friends and relatives. When was the last time your chair or refrigerator did anything nice for you?

If you have an iPhone, things get even easier. There is an iPhone software application available, produced by eStarling, that adds a one-click, send-to-frame feature to your iPhone camera. You don't even have to email a photo to the frame. Just take the picture and if you like it, click the Send to eStarling button to get it on your frame...within seconds of taking the photo. You can edit the photos directly on eStarling's digital asset management site...add a "Happy Holidays from Us!" caption to your family photo before you send it over to your sibling's ImpactV.

This is the cutting edge of gadgetry and home accessories and makes for a superb holiday gift. The retail price for ImpactV is only $199.99. All eStarling products, the Impact7, Impact8 and ImpactV, are available at eStarling.com and shipping is handled by Amazon.com's fulfillment service.

For more information please visit www.eStarling.com.

Unless otherwise indicated, this is a preview article for the featured product. A formal review may or may not follow in the future.