The Cyberus Smart Info Engine may sound like a steampunk computer which connects to the Victorian Internet (which would actually be awesome) but it is instead the most full-featured digital photo-frame ever.
To be fair, the manufacturer, Sungale, wouldn’t describe it like that. The company (which does make LCD photo-frames) is selling this as a device which can do almost everything in the way of entertainment: Internet radio, e-book reader, movie and music player, photo-frame (natch), RSS, Gmail, and so on. In fact, the only thing it doesn’t seem to do is connect directly to the web through a browser, which is an odd omission in a Wi-Fi-enabled box (although it might just be an omission from the spec sheet).
Add to that a big seven-inch touch screen and a planned price of $280 and this starts to look like a rather compelling little box. And then things start to go wrong.
First, about that “e-book” reader. The screen may be “high-resolution” (actually, at 800×480 it is not), but e-ink it isn’t, and the reader only offers support for PDF (a terrible e-book format) and plain text files. Not even the emerging epub standard or rtf. Then there’s the movie “support”, which is AVI-only, or the almost brain-melting lack of MP3 support (you need to convert music to WMA).
Photo support is (of course) better: you can pop in an SD card to view JPG, TIF, PNG and BMP formats. And you’d better leave that card in there: the device ships with just 1GB of memory.
Worse still is the battery life. The Web site claims two hours, the press release four, but either way that is pretty poor, especially as this isn’t a power-hungry all-purpose laptop.
It is inevitable that this will be compared to the iPod Touch, which has a smaller screen but does all of the above and more, along with a battery that actually lasts long enough to read a book. It also has 8GB of memory and costs $80 less. Oh, and it doesn’t look like a school-teacher’s Filofax, either.
Product page [Sungale]
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