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Customer Reviews: Average Rating:  Rating :  - Destination - Landfill. An Epic Fail by Coby
I received this from a gift exchange game at work and was quite happy at first - a digital photo frame is not something I would buy for myself - but my joy quickly faded when I tried to use my new gift.
I plugged this product in expecting it to work like a standard USB drive with a photo-viewing display. My expectation was a device that I could just plug in anywhere, drag and drop photo files to it, and go - just like any other sane USB storage device product.
That is not the way this product is intended to work. Installation of COBY's proprietary Photo Viewer Software seems to be REQUIRED in order for this product to work as intended.
The installation of the Photo Viewer Software was not user-friendly. When you insert the disk, you do not get the nice Autorun feature that any other civilized Windows program provides. Instead you get a Readme.txt file that has you drilling down into subfolders on the CD in order to find the correct installer based on your OS. After that, installation went smoothly except for extraneous steps that served no purpose except to make me click "Next" an additional time. It's just one extra mouse click but it is still evidence of a lack of attention to detail by the developers.
When you finally do get around to plugging the device in, in order for the program to recognize it you need to monkey with a menu screen on the device itself to choose between charging the battery and "updating" the device. I'm suspicious that charging and updating cannot be done simultaneously as a reasonable person would expect.
When I started the program, the first thing I encountered was a warning message box stating "Upload Completely!", yet more evidence of lack of attention to detail by the developers. The program itself looks like it was written for Windows 3.0. The toolbar icons in the program somehow manage to be blurry and aliased both at the same time; I have no idea how even the most novice graphical artist manages that anti-feat. The two-step shuffle required to select photos from the disk and then upload them to the device feels clunky and unintuitive. Context menus are totally absent.
Once I uploaded some photos to the device, I nearly undid all of my work trying to remove the stock photos that were included with the device - there are two delete toolbar buttons, with different icons, right next to each other. The only thing that saved me was yet another poorly-worded message box asking, "Make sure to clear all images?" Of course, I couldn't answer "Yes" or "No" like a sane person would expect, because the only options presented to me were "Ok" and "Cancel".
After all that, I still did manage to lose my work. The program gave the impression that the photos had been uploaded to the device when they hadn't - perhaps if the "Some images have been edited. Are you sure to exit?" dialog was more clear about which changes were unsaved (I assumed it was the cropping work I had done on the "local" side of the app), this could have been avoided. It turns out that there is a final "Download Images" button that needs to be clicked to finish the process, which rewards you with another poorly-worded message box stating "Download Completely!"
I usually hate and avoid products that require me to install their proprietary crapware (beyond basic drivers) in order to use them, and this product demonstrates exactly why I harbor that hatred.
If only the device behaved like a standard USB storage device, I could ditch the unforgivable software and keep the picture frame. Unfortunately, since the software and picture frame are symbiotically tied together, both will likely lie in a landfill (or end up recycled) in a few days. + See Full Customer Review |  |
