Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

REVISED 8/12/2017 - STAY AWAY FOR YOUR SANITY Do not buy this model frame, either new or used. All the comments I made in my initial review below remain true - except for the network connectivity. These frames have extremely poor connectivity with WiFi hotspots, but the key factor is Nixplay's software surrounding WiFi passwords and connection. Mark my words: you will spend more time messing with this frame and its connectivity than you imagine is possible. You will fiddle with "resetting" the frame with a paperclip poked into a reset hole, and cycling power. You will connect to your wifi again and again and update the firmware. And you will reset the frame again. And you will "pair" the frame with your Nixplay account. Oh, will you ever pair that thing. Over and over. And it will forget. You will not forget. You will notice that even with today's (August 2017) firmware build, the frame occasionally forgets it was ever connected to your WiFi. You will notice this even when your frame is physically within a few feet of your WAP. You will see how the frame denies you've entered the correct password even when you're staring at the correct password on the freaking screen, and all your other modern devices (iPhones and iPads and your mother's Android and your kids' friends' phones) ALL connect FINE. You will curse the company. You will have endless discussions with the Nixplay support desk in the Philippines. You will do all this even though you're not an internet or COTS IT newbie. You will do this when you have a system with 5 WAPs in your house. You will do this even if you make your living as an IT professional. You will curse, however, like a sailor. On your deathbed you will make statements regretting that you did those things. Your time and your life are worth more than that - do NOT buy this thing. Nixplay makes more current frames that are more headache-free. This one is a dog, clearly designed poorly in both software (newer updates are better) and hardware (sunk cost - no updating this piece of cr4p) perhaps before the company had the right sort of engineers. I still like the Nixplay ecosystem, and the website and newer frames in 2017 are getting pretty mature. But the bloom is off the rose for me - I have 5 of this model frame for us and grandmas and such...and if I had a nickel for every hour I've beaten my head against this thing... OLD, INITIAL REVIEW BELOW Overall, truly fantastic. PROs - Great picture (not HD, but very good at normal viewing distances) - Terrific cloud photo ecosystem, with fairly easy drag/drop web interface (improving continually at Nixplay) - Excellent remote frame management - once a frame is set up at, say, a grandparent's house, you can shoot photos to it at will from across the country (or world) without any grandparent interaction - Pretty much the best customer service of any company I have ever worked with (seriously!) - Company commitment to continuous improvement in both products and ecosystem CONs - Weak wifi subsystem, as compared, say, to your smartphone or other wifi devices. The frame has to be pretty close to your wireless access point for a good connection. Sometimes when powered on, the frame will not boot into a connected state, and you have to slog through the wifi connection anew (search/select SSID, enter passphrase, and attempt connection). Interestingly, there’s a setting for “bad network enablement” or something; setting this to “enabled” does seem to help somewhat – but doesn’t solve it fully. Even when the frame is connected fine, it’ll sometimes drop the connection for no reason and have to reconnect. Nixplay needs to get better wifi transceivers on future models. - Remote control seems to chew through batteries pretty quickly. The battery door on the remote is pretty standard fare, but was hard for my 83 y-o Mom to open/replace battery. - As others have pointed out, the remote control is also square – essentially symmetrical -- so people with imperfect vision can easily point the wrong end at the frame, with the result that the frame doesn’t respond. This could be fixed with an easy-to-see red arrow painted on the remote (thinking about getting out the red nail polish for the grandmas). - This is a real nit – or suggestion – but the buttons on the frame itself (replicating the remote control’s buttons) are awkwardly placed on the back of the frame. You practically need to have the frame in your lap to use these. It would make much more sense to have a few buttons on the edge of the frame – akin to a Kindle reader – so that a few folks standing around the frame can click forward, or back, thru the pictures. At some point I assume Nixplay will make a full-fledged touchscreen frame allowing swipes to scroll thru photos, etc., but just a few buttons on either side of the frame would do wonders for casual flipping through photos without having to get out the remote. - It would be nice if there were a way to pre-load a wifi connection, so that a gift of the frame could be more easily set up by a nontechnical recipient in their own home. Not sure how that would work, but if you do give this to a non-geek, you’ll have to walk them thru the procedure if you’re not physically present to do it for them. NEUTRAL COMMENTS - The online system for managing photos is very nice – essentially drag & drop, and makes it easy to manage any number of frames remotely. It does take some playing to figure out your own “system” – how to use albums and playlists to manage what pix are on what frames. Once you get the hang of it, it’s pretty intuitive (and there’s a necessary complexity to the game that’s unavoidable in order to have all the capabilities that it does). But when you get a frame just load a passel of sample photos, and play with the online system. - BTW you can upload photos at pretty much any resolution and the frame just fits the photos as you like them…but I recommend fixing the JPG output from your photo program, if possible, at 1280x960. Though the W15A frame is native at 1024x768, pictures exported at 1024x768 resolution have noticeable artifacts on close inspection when viewed in the frame. But I can’t notice any real difference between original photo resolution (for our camera, about 4 times bigger files), and 1280x960, when presented in the frame. This saves memory space. OVERALL This frame has really opened up our photo world. I’m a huge fan of this company and hope they continue to succeed. Having gone digital 10-15 years ago, our thousands of photos accrete over the years essentially unseen…unless I’d taken the time to select and print a few out – or get everyone around the big-screen TV to watch our last vacation (kind of a big production that happens only rarely). So we got frames for both grandmas, a sister-in-law, and also for ourselves. Now, we can whoosh photos of the kid’s baseball game halfway across the country to grandmas in two different states – and the photos update on their frames automatically…within moments of the game ending. As for our own house, we keep the frame on a bar in the kitchen…and it’s very easy to ship a set of photos to it. When we have friends staying from out of town, we put photos from prior visits or past lives on the frame – a great way to remember great times as we share new ones. So the net effect of this frame, and the company’s great ecosystem, is that we’re enjoying more of our photos on a regular basis. I agonized about whether to give the frame four or five stars; I think it deserves 4.5 stars: it’s a great company and ecosystem – just needs a smidge more polish on the product end. Go Nixplay.