So I got the Sylvania picture frame from Dollar General. $50 normally, cut down to $30 on Thanksgiving day.
I'll get pictures of the frame in action tomorrow, but it's a bare bones digital picture frame that uses some kind of weird Android-based firmware called "Frameo". Frameo is yet another social IoT service that is licensed to multiple manufacturers. My digital picture frame is Sylvania branded, though the actual company is Curtis International.
The whole gimmick of Frameo is that once you get your picture frame set up, you begin to add "friends" who also use Frameo using their associated smartphone app. Whoever is on your Frameo contact list can send pictures directly to your own photo frame, while you can send photos back to your contacts for display on their frames. I know of no one who uses Frameo, and this was the first time I've heard of this IoT service. In fact, when I was starting to read the manual, I thought Frameo was a typo at first!
There is a good side to this though. You don't have to even use the friends feature. All you need is a microSD card or a USB flash drive (with an OTG adapter they don't include, of course) to import photos to the device. Once you get your pictures on the device, it can work as a standard digital photo frame. This ensures that if Frameo ever goes under, you can still use the photo frame for it's intended purpose offline as there is no kind of account creation when you set up the frame itself.
Frameo appears to use some kind of code generator that is unique to each frame, which really reeks of the cumbersome Nintendo Wii "Friend Codes" of the past. You pass these codes on to any others you know that have Frameo, and they enter the code to add your frame as a contact. They also claim to use end to end encryption as well. The frame has built in Wifi to facilitate your contacts sending pictures to your frame and vice versa.
As for the frame itself, it's definitely low end, and perhaps it should be sold for $30 every day. The viewing angle is rather poor from the sides, thanks to using a standard TFT LCD with 1024x600 resolution. The OS is listed as Android 6.0, but it's using the custom Frameo UI with no way to sideload APKs or install third party launchers without hacking the device outright. Performance as a general Android tablet would suck anyway. The box only lists basic specs, but the manual shows the CPU as a Rockchip 3126 ARM SoC with only 512mb DDR3 RAM. The Frameo UI is responsive enough in menus and slideshows, but lag does appear when importing lots of photos from external storage.
So yeah, it's yet another cheap tech device made to appeal to Black Friday shoppers looking to save a few pennies. As a basic digital photo frame, it does the job and the screen resolution is much higher than regular digital frames, but who knows if anyone else is familiar with Frameo.