Bring Your Household Decor to the 21st Century With the Meural Smart Wifi Photo Frame
Show off a different piece of art every day or display your favourite family photos and cherished NFT with this beautiful piece of smart tech.
Showcasing your favourite images has never looked better or been more effortless. Gone are the days of going to the closest printing shop and paying to print out images that you want to put up around your house. With the Meural Smart WiFi photo frame, you can display whatever image you please, whenever you please, on a beautiful 15.6inch display. Whether it’s your one-of-a-kind NFT you just purchased or the photo of your niece you took on your iPhone, everything looks its best in a frame.
Look, posters look fine. But, there is a reason frames exist. Printing an image or buying a poster and sticking it to your wall is fine, but the difference in elegance and appearance between a framed image and one without a frame is night and day. If you care enough to display your NFT, do your images the service of displaying it in the best possible way. The Meural Smart WiFi Photo Frame from Netgear is that way. With a full HD display, the Smart Frame easily connects to your phone and accesses any album you wish it to showcase. Whether it’s slowly cycling through the last decade of family memories or it’s showcasing the NFT you can’t stop telling people about 24/7, it will be your favourite household decoration.
Key Features
With the Smart Frame and its accompanying app, it couldn’t be easier to select and choose which images you want to showcase. Play, share, customise and update all from the intuitive, easy-to-use smartphone application.
At any time or location, you can use the application on your phone to select or make albums full of photos for the Smart Frame to showcase.
Not the only one in your family with a Smart Frame? Even better! If your besties or parents are also the proud owners of a Smart Frame, you can instantly share photos between your Smart Frame and theirs.
Syncing to Async Art, the Smart Frame can display a playlist of over 200 curated artworks from Asyncs library of NFT artworks that react to real-life weather, time of day, location and even stock prices.
Drawbacks
- Some users have claimed that Smart Frame isn’t as intuitive as it could be. Users have claimed that it is quite slow to upload images to the Smart Frame, taking hours for the album you wish to display to be available on the Smart Frame.
- The Smart Frame is clunky. Not in the way it displays photos but in the little things. At times, it will display the home page even though you’ve displayed it or the transition between beautiful photos is slow and ugly, ruining the ambience the frame provides.
- The gesture sensor, which allows users to swipe the screen and transition photos, is clumsy, at best. At times, it picks up phantom gestures as you walk by the frame, other times you have to gesture five times in front of the frame for it to sense the movement.
Our Final Opinion on this Gadget
This is a fantastic device if displaying images is your only worry. The quality of the images that the Smart Frame displays are top-notch. Whether it is a family photo, your smiling dog or NFT, it will undoubtedly look the best it possibly can on Netgear Smart WiFi Photo Frame. The included app is easy to understand and use and it is simple to select and upload albums to the device. The app also makes it easy to share images with whomever you please.
However, the user experience isn’t as smooth as it could be, with almost every review reading like “it’s great, but ____ could be tweaked”. While the vast majority of users were happy with the product, as it sits with an average rating of over four stars, when you’re spending over three hundred dollars on a photo frame, whether it’s smart or not, you want it to be a smooth and easy experience. While the positives far outweigh the negatives, the drawbacks of the Smart Photo Frame by Netgear should be looked at before purchasing.
FAQ
The display size of the Meural Smart WiFi Photo frame is 15.6”. The full dimensions of the smart frame (in landscape) are as follows:
Width: 16in (408 mm), Height: 10 in (259 mm), Depth: 1.68 in (42.4 mm), Weight: 2.9 lb or (1.3kg)
While Smart frames that use Bluetooth or other ways of connection exist, for this and most other similar products, the only way to connect your phone or chosen device to the smart photo frame is through a WiFi connection.
This is an answer that each individual will have to answer for themselves. However, strictly from a financial point of view, the answer is yes. If you were to buy a frame for each picture you would like to display across your house, not to mention the price of printing the images or buying them, you would be spending far more than the $200-$400 asking price of a Smart Photo Frame, and it shows far more of your photos than you could ever hope to display in your home with an average photo frame.
Max Delaney is a Journalism student at Macquarie University, joining Gadget User in 2022 and reporting on a variety of topics. Only early in his career, Max is excited to write guides, reviews and more to help you make informed purchases!