Wallflower 2 Networked Digital Picture Frame Now Shipping

The new Wallflower 2 Networked Digital Picture Frame looks like it will own the mid-price digital frame market with an incredible feature set.

The Wallflower 2 is one of the many digital picture frames on the market, but unlike many cheaper competitors, they’ve got some serious high-end (but easy-to-use) features to entice users, and a price that while much higher than the competition is certainly more than reasonable given everything that you get.

First, the Wallflower 2 packs in a 12.1″ or 14.1″ LCD screen running at 1024x768 resolution, with your choice of high-quality framing. While we’d love to see even larger or higher-res screen, this is better than than the average 800x600, 640x480, or even the smaller 320x240 (or around that) displays. Now granted, a larger screen doesn’t mean more dots-per-inch, or higher actual resolution – that is, a 12″ 640x480 is the same DPI as a 6″ 320x240 frame. But, more overall pixels are generally better.

With a built-in 40GB hard drive, and networking (wired or optional wi-fi), you can literally use drag-and-drop on your Windows or Mac machine to load up files for the Wallflower 2 to ‘grab’ from, there’s no software to install, and configuration is done via its custom built-in web interface. You do also have the option to direct-load from USB cameras and flash drives if you’d prefer, or don’t have the computer on.

The Wallflower 2 also offers the ability to pull digital pictures (and other information) from the internet, via email or specific web downloads, or even pulling random pictures from other Wallflower units that have been turned on to ‘publish’ pictures. While the latter might seem a bit strange, the former means you can easily let friends and family ‘push’ pictures to your frame. And best of all, there’s no service fees whatsoever for the internet-connectivity features (above, of course, your normal ISP fees). The internet-pull features allow you to put a file up on a website that directs what other images to then grab, good for a family trying to distribute updated pictures daily/weekly to the entire family around the world. It can also grab images from a specified POP3/IMAP email account, so you can set up a ‘dropbox’ that family members can mail new pictures to for your frame. Cool!

So it’s a digital picture frame, right? Well yes, but the Wallflower 2 is also much more than just that. See, the new model can now also play movie files (Mpeg1/2/4, AVI, QT, DivX), music files (MP3, WAV, even playlists), and more, and has a line-out plug for playing audio through speakers or to your home theater setup, or can optionally be purchased configured with built-in speakers as well. Oh, and it can also display RSS news feeds on the screen on-demand as well. Okay, now I really want one!

For the real geeks, you can sort of write ’scripts’ for what gets played back – an uber-playlist of sorts – including which photos to show, what audio to play in the background, seconds to wait on each picture (a certain number, or until end of current audio file), etc. Looks pretty powerful. You can also create ‘albums’ of pictures to show together, and have the option to show image titles on screen (custom titles, or just the filename).

The ‘business’ version of the frame is also targeted to playing PowerPoint or Flash files, for use as a front-office wall display, and has more advanced remote control and scripting capabilities. Makes sense.

Starting at just $649, the Wallflower 2 could make a great holiday gift – albeit a pricey one! Visit the for more details, or read on for the full release.