Got the box overnight, no probs, apprehension kicked in due to some of the funky reviews this thing has gotten…

Opened the box, hooked it up, filled in the blanks, and 15 min after opening the box I had photo’s from friends popping up on the screen.

Tried a random RSS feed from a friends Flickr collection… And although this took 3 tries before I got the right rss feed type it worked like a dream after that, a little slow on the download for those (had to wait 8min before 1st pic showed up).

Tested the e-mail message function, works

Tested the frame to e-mail function, works (be it a slightly pointless function from my perspective)

So now I’m kinda surprised what the problems where. So I reset the whole thing, take it to a friends house and try to screw it all up… Couldn’t manage it… No matter how backwards I follow the instructions this thing seems to just, well, work…

So I guess that eStarling and co has managed to work through any probs that existed.

Couple of feature requests:
Network ID, in the list on the router it just shows up as a MAC address (which is on a sticker on the back in there defence)
On the site it should display who e-mailed which picture (it’s guess work right now, to great amusement of my friends)
An off button, you can only either pull the plug or use the time on/off setting.

Here is my overall take of my nightmare with eStarling.

If I could describe the overall build quality of the frame I would ask one to first construct a similar frame from popsical sticks and wood glue. When you are finished you will most likely end up with a product with better quality than the toy plastic rickety eStarling frame!

My frame arrived and looked as if one of eStarling’s employees left it to their 6 year old to explore, or a monkey, either way the frame was completely ripped off the monitor unit!! HOW does that even make it through any sort of quality control? I’ll tell you how, there is none!!

Surprisingly the frame turned on, despite my elevated blood pressure and sudden urge to throw it through a wall, I wanted to see how it worked software wise.

I connected my frame to my PC via USB, frame recognized it was attached to a PC, so far so good. I download the third party software that is required to even get the frame to run wirelessly. Go figure the software didn’t run thanks to bad programming, I tried this on 3 PCs, when I called eStarling to ask WTF the deal was, they said “thats not our issue, its the company that wrote the software and they are working on it”, THUS rendering the whole reason why I bought this big heaping pile of dog shit completely moot!!.

Way to go eStarling.

PS I sent the frame in last Monday (Jan 7th) second day air. It is now Jan 15th and I still don’t have my money back. THEY ARE QUICK!!!!