I have been on the search for Sideshow devices having only managed to find a couple at CES. So when I had the chance to try i-Mate's wireless Photo frame with Sideshow I jumped at the chance.

The device is an i-mate Momento 70 7-Inch Wireless Digital Picture Frame. It has wireless support so I set it up on the network, using the remote to enter the WEP key. Once I had added the device to the network I could then browse the UPNP servers on the network, so my Media Center PC, Home Server and laptops were listed. I selected my Media Center PC and over on the PC Windows Media Player Network sharing prompted me to allow sharing, after I had done that I could browse the shared media folders of PC. I selected the top level pictures folder and it began displaying the photos.

I made a couple of setting changes, including random playback of photos and setting the power saving settings to reduce the brightness at night. Ideally I would like to be able to set advanced timers, such as during week days have it only on in the evenings and at the weekend on all day. I could do this with home automation timers.

In use the frame works just as expected, I got it to display the pictures in a random order and set the display time to change every minute. Now to the Sideshow functions, this is an feature that I wasn't expecting to much from and I was right. Getting it connected as a Sideshow device was easy, you just browse the network, find the frame and then right click and click Install. The drivers load from Windows Update and then it's ready to go. The problem is the lack of useful gadgets. By default Windows ships with a Windows Media Player , Windows Mail and Outlook Gadget. These gadgets are pretty useless for me as I use my Xbox 360 for listening to music, Windows Live Mail for email and don't have Outlook installed on my Media Center PC. So I headed to the Gadgets download site. This is another disappointment with only 21 gadgets to choose from. I tried all 3 RSS readers and found one didn't work at all, one only displayed the number of unread feeds and only the final one I tried (from Microsoft) actually worked ok. The problem seems to be that the unlike other Sideshow devices (like the Ricavision remote, see this video I did at CES) you can't interact with Sideshow, so on the Ricavision it would say "13 Unread Feeds" and then you could select the feeds and start reading them on the iMate device you can't do that, so the the gadget has to display all the information without user interaction. The Microsoft feed viewer works ok because once you have installed it then lets you create separate gadgets for each feed (using IE's feed list). I could create a gadget for BBC news and one for Motor Sport news etc, this means that you get the first unread item of each feed on the photo frame, so it's just about useful for headlines. The Windows Media Player gadget is ok when your listening to music on the connected PC. It display the current state (paused, playing etc) the track and the artist. For some reason rather than showing the Album it displays the name of the next track on the album, which if your in shuffle mode is irrelevant, I think this is a bug in the Photo Frames implementation of SideShow.

To be honest there are not enough Sideshow gadgets to make that side of it interesting, if I had more time I would look at getting the SDK and write one for Media Center Health Monitor project, that way you would be able to see the heath of your system from the Photo Frame.

I do like the wireless features, being able to stream the photos directly form my Media Center PC works well for me and is much better than messing with memory cards. As soon as I download photos from my camera they can display on the photo frame

There is whole Internet element to the Frame I have not tired. You can connect it up to i-Mates web site and email pictures to it or send them from a mobile phone. You can also set it to display photos from an RSS feed, maybe give this a try later, it looks like you have to pay for the service but there is a 90 free trial

My wife really likes the frame, I thought at first I may get some negative reaction about having another gadget around the house but she liked it, it looks nice and she likes having the kids photos on there.

So overall I like the i-mate. The sideshow function are let down by not being able to interact with them and the lack of gadgets (have a look at the complete list here) but the wireless function are good and the overall look of the Frame is nice.

Has anybody got any suggestion for Sideshow gadgets I should try?