Here's a case study of two companies' approaches to making the most of widgets -- radio, scores, headlines and other Web goodies wirelessly grabbed from the Internet.
In this corner, the DreamScreen from Hewlett-Packard. It's available in 10- and 13-inch versions for $250 and $300.
In that corner, Toshiba's less attractively named DMF82XKU (8 inches, $180) and DMF102XKU (10 inches, $230). Each can play music, display photos and present widgets.
Both are sleek wide-screen displays with a 1-inch margin of glossy black. You can load up either frame with photos, videos and unprotected music files by inserting a memory card, a USB flash drive or a USB cable connected to a Mac or PC. But that's where the similarities end.
Toshiba's frame lets you subscribe to any of 1,000 widgets at Framechannel.com. It's a fantastic variety: BBC. Facebook updates. Twitter posts. And so on.
The Toshiba's software design is somewhat baffling. It consists of simple lists of text commands, but at least it's quick and efficient.
The DreamScreen from HP, on the other hand, has a lush, colorful, icon-driven software design. The company thinks it's really onto something; a public relations person calls it "a breakthrough new platform."
Well, that might be pushing it. The widgets are far more limited than the Toshiba's; each represents an individual deal made by HP (as opposed to Framechannel's public-bazaar approach). They include Clock, Facebook, Weather and, for Web photos, Snapfish. (Snapfish? Not Flickr?)You can't add any new ones, although HP says that it will, through software updates.
But in terms of polish and design finesse, the DreamScreen might better be called the NightmareScreen.
Over and over again, the software gets in your way. You can't hear the different alarm sounds as you scroll through them. There's no indication on the frame that the alarm has been set. The audio and video get out of sync during the frame's tutorial videos.
On options screens, like the one where you set up your clock, the settings appear in a tall column. If you want to adjust only one of them -- Clock Style, the first option -- you would think that pressing OK on the remote would mean "I'm finished, take me back." But no. You have to walk all the way down the screen, using the remote's arrow buttons, past all of the other options, to highlight the OK button on the screen, and then press the OK button on the remote to "click" that. It's exhausting.
My favorite bug: You can choose Internet radio stations either by nation of origin or by genre. But the two lists have gotten mixed up in the software. So your choices of music genre are Algeria, Alternative, Ambient, American Samoa and so on.
The frame is dog slow, too. Ten seconds to start up the Clock.
So there it is: a study in contrasts. One frame where almost no thought was put into the software design, resulting in an infinitely flexible, crude but less expensive machine. And another frame where, in fact, the software design was overthought -- resulting in a more limited, sluggish machine with glitches.
Maybe someone should get those two sets of designers together for coffee someday. Yeah -- coffee and widgets.
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