Part digital picture frame, part Dropbox, the Lyve Minds LyveHome looks to combine a network-attached device to store all your photos and videos with a convenient way to view them in your home. This $299 device packs 2TB of storage for all your memories, and can be accessed from any mobile device. The LyveHome looks like a Tardis accidentally dematerialized in the paint section of Home Depot. The white box is a 5.3 x 3.5 x 3.5-inch device that has a smartphone-size touch screen with a huge caboose. The 5-inch, 960 x 549-pixel display looks and performs admirably for the device's singular purpose: displaying photographs in a never-ending slideshow. It features good connectivity for getting photos to the device: On the rear, you'll find a Gigabit Ethernet port and a USB 2.0 port, and on the side, there's a separate SD card slot. In addition, a single HDMI port on the rear can be used to show off your shots on a connected television. The initial setup process for the LyveHome couldn't be any easier.

Power up the LyveHome, and after a few minutes of initialization, the device will ask you to either pick an available Wi-Fi network (and enter its password) or plug in an Ethernet cable. Used Tires For Sale In Salisbury MarylandAfter that, it will quickly check for a software update — which I liked — and prompt you to either create a Lyve account or sign in with your pre-existing one. Homes For Sale In Negaunee Township MiThe former requires only a first and last name, email address and password.House For Sale Hwy 324 Rock Hill Sc MORE: 15 Amazing Smart Home Gadgets Once the device is up and running, it's time to start stashing pictures and videos on the device, which you can do in a number of ways.

You can just plug a USB drive straight into the LyveHome's single USB 2.0 port (photo and video junkies looking to fill those 2TB much faster would have benefited from USB 3.0). You can also take your SD card right out of your camera and stick it in the LyveHome's empty slot. You can also transfer photos to the LyveHome via Ethernet or wireless, but you'll need to install a companion Lyve application before you can start tossing media over — thankfully, the apps are available for Windows, OS X, Android, iOS and the Kindle Fire. It's a bit of a bummer that you can't just drag-and-drop pictures and videos to the LyveHome's internal storage from a Windows or OS X desktop. But I understand why: The app is, after all, the LyveHome's secret sauce. Like any network-attached storage device, whatever you copy to the LyveHome can be accessed from other devices that have a Lyve app installed. Fire up the smartphone Lyve app, and you can browse through your shots without having to keep your collection on your device.

If you're thinking that you could use the LyveHome as a backup device, you'd be right — sort of.  As far as we can tell, there's no great way to get your original images back off of the LyveHome unless you're using its OS X app. The Windows app only lets you select which folders you want to auto-import (copy) over to the LyveHome; you can't remove pictures, nor can you even use it to browse the images on the device. Don't expect this to be Dropbox, 'cuz it ain't; unless this functionality is added to the Windows app posthaste, it greatly reduces the LyveHome's overall usefulness. The Lyve app can automatically import photos from your smartphone's gallery. You could possibly (and annoyingly) select each item one by one on Android and share it to a new location, but that's hardly much of a "restore" process. Heck, I couldn't even select multiple files to remove en masse on LyveHome's OS X app. MORE: Smart Home Wars: Big Opportunity, Bigger Hurdles All of LyveHome's apps rely on timelines for organizing and displaying your images.

You can't organize your media any other way. This limitation reduces the effectiveness of LyveHome's photo streaming if you've already organized all your shots into folders, and it makes it even worse if your images don't have any EXIF data about the date they were taken. We have many frustrations with the LyveHome hardware. While it's a nice idea, in theory, to be able to look at your photos on the device, your pictures play through in an order you cannot determine; you can't select which photos you want to view. You can tap the screen to stop on a particular image, but you can never stop the scroll from coming back. You can't watch videos. Your landscape photos are too tiny. The screen never goes off by itself (drawing around 6 to 8 watts of power in total), and it takes too many swipes and taps to turn it off otherwise. If you have the LyveHome set up on your nightstand late at night, you'll hear the repeated powering up and powering down of what I can only presume is a tiny internal fan meant to cool the device's insides.

It will drive you nuts. Lyve Minds somehow manages to get simplicity wrong. I appreciate the company's great ideas related to media preservation and sharing. However, its device and service feel incomplete, too OS X-minded and far too expensive for the limited functionality you get in return. I'd rather spend that $300 on six years of unlimited storage and accessibility at a service like Flickr Pro, or on a dedicated network-attached storage device that lacks a built-in display but offers much greater functionality (like the ability to store files other than photos) for the same price. The LyveHome could be worth it someday, but it's going to take some time to get there.Last year, I backed the Electric Objects Kickstarter, a campaign to produce a digital picture frame built from a 23-inch 1080p panel and integrated ARM computer. It's something that, on paper, sounds like something you could just build yourself--you can buy a similarly-sized IPS panel for under $150 and attach it to a $35 Raspberry Pi.

What Electric Objects is going for, however, seems to be an elegant and intentional design in both the hardware and software--a complete solution that works right out of the box. That box arrived earlier this month, and I've been using the Electric Objects EO1 frame for the past week. As a screenprint collector, here's what I think about it so far, and what it's trying to accomplish.On the hardware side, the display itself is a matte 23-inch 1080p panel with a 250 nit backlight--pretty standard for 16:9 monitor you can get from monitor makers like Dell. The custom stuff is all in the frame around that panel to make it look like a framed piece of art. The 3/4-inch bezel is in line with the frames I like for my 18x24 screenprints, is even on all sizes, and has a slightly angled taper toward the back. The "frame" itself isn't as thick as most monitors, but the computer hardware--a 1GHz dual-core Cortex-A9 system with built-in Wi-Fi and bluetooth--bulges from the back, so it does float a little bit off the wall.

Mounting hardware is included.The quality of the screen is good, with all the perks of an IPS panel: good color reproduction, high contrast, and wide viewing angles. It being matte also helps a lot with visibility in daylight, though it will look washed out from certain reflective angles. Of course, the LCD has downsides as well, as images with black backgrounds don't look completely black in the dark (even with auto-brightness), and 250 nits isn't bright enough to make images pop in a fully day-lit room. I didn't notice any backlight bleed, though. With the intent of keeping the hardware as simple as possible, there's no OSD for calibrating the display--only a single button for putting the EO1 to sleep when you don't want it on.Other than the fact that this is an active backlit display, the most obvious difference between this and a piece of printed art is the image resolution. 1080p is sufficient for putting up photos or animated GIFs and appreciating them from afar, but get up close to the EO1 and you're going to notice the pixels.

One of the things I love about screenprints is being able to scrutinize the minute details and nuances natural to the printing process. Even with fine digital prints, there's a physicality in the CMYK separations that lets you know how an artist intended the work to be seen when you put your eyeball up to the paper. You can't do that here--art on the EO1 is meant to be appreciated from at least a few feet away.But these limitations, in the eyes of EO1's creators, are features inherent to their vision of the digital canvas. Digital art is fundamentally different than printed art, and maybe you're supposed to experience and enjoy it differently. And the most notable "feature" of the Electric Objects display is its inability to run slideshows.The makers of the EO1 intentionally designed the experience so that users feel committed to the art they put in the frame. To that end, there is no interface on the device itself--everything is controlled with either a simple smartphone app or the Electric Objects website.

From those places, you can browse a public gallery of artwork submitted by other users, or upload your own (which can be either public or private). Uploading can be as simple as pasting a link to an animated GIF found on Tumblr, which then can be centered or blown up to fill the EO1's 16:9 screen. Or as I should put it, 9:16 aspect ratio, since portrait is the only orientation supported. There's no option to rotate images for landscape view (though that's easy enough to manually do), and as mentioned earlier, no option to automatically cycle through a series of images or tie the EO1 to something like a Flickr gallery.And that's the point--the experience here is curated by its design restrictions. The art you put on EO1 is meant to stay on your screen and fade into the background of your living or workspace, not be something that pulls your attention whenever you walk into the room. How long you keep an individual piece of art displayed on the EO1 is tracked and tied to your account, so you can see what pieces are resonating with other users.

In the first two days of using the display, I uploaded, tested, and swapped out about a dozen different pieces of art until I found one that was right for the space I set the device up in. Since then, I've kept it on an image--a photograph of a gothic spaceship--that feels like it belongs among the other framed prints and objects in my living room.In one sense, the art you put on the EO1 is like the wallpaper you set up for your PC or smartphone: something you can swap out from time to time, but more likely than not commit to for an extended duration (how often do you change your phone's background image?). If the proper analogy for the EO1 is a computer's wallpaper, then the image on the EO1 is supposed to live in the background; instead of being a backdrop to desktop icons, it's a backdrop to the real-world objects on your desk or living space. It's an interesting notion for digital art that bears some consideration. (I also don't know if this first version of Electric Objects is right for the home--it may be better suited for your office space, where running 35 watts for art's sake is on the company dime.)

But experimenting with this concept of putting some physicality and permanence to the digital isn't cheap--Electric Objects EO1 cost $300 for Kickstarter backers and now retails for $500. That's a lot, even with the custom hardware and software (including backend) development. The experience does leave much to be desired--I feel like EO1 could be thinner have a better-integrated computer component, and I'm not sure if the 9:16 aspect ratio was chosen just because of panel availability. It'll be interesting to see if future iterations of Electric Objects will adopt sizes and aspect ratios that look less like computer monitors--an 18x24 display or even a 12x36 panel would be striking.When I browse art prints at conventions, galleries, or web stores, one thing I keep in mind is the difference between a piece I like because it's something I would want to hang up on a wall, or a piece that would look more suitable on a monitor or phone's locks screen. The difference between something that would be great as wall art and something that would make great digital wallpaper is a matter of personal taste, but an important one (I make the same distinction for t-shirts).