Review: Sungale Shines a Light on Digi Frame Category

Okay – so the evolution in the digital frame space continues as we’ve seen just about every imaginable configuration and feature set in this market over the last few years.

However, Sungale recently came to market with a small 3.5” digital frame that is part of a desk lamp setup that is rather intriguing. Seemed an odd  combo at first, until you consider one of the problems inherent in the current digital frame world. Consumers were in a big rush to buy them and now, a bit further down the road, rarely use them.

The reasons for this are numerous – updating the images stored on the frames’ internal memory is a bit of a hassle as is swapping out a new media card if the images are stored that way. And then there’s this one -  simply forgetting to turn it on everyday.

One of the reasons for that last excuse is the fact many are placed in a room the consumer simply doesn’t frequent everyday. That would bring us to the new Sungale gadget. With the Desk Lamp Digital Photo Frame the company has built a digi frame into an item you turn on just about everyday.

The images displayed on LCD  are sharp and video is surprisingly crisp and easy to upload. The device also plays MP3 files which makes infinitely more sense with this setup as you would be more likely to be sitting down at the desk and staying a while versus the MP3 capability present in a frame that you had in, say, the living room where your stay might be more fleeting.

The frame’s screen resides in a little pop-up area on the base of the lamp. The screen has a resolution of 320×240 but appears even stronger than this and also features 512 MB of built-in memory. Tucked away on the side of the device is a USB port as well as a card slot that takes SD, MMC, MS media. An easy to navigate on screen menu will take you to the video clip of your choice but there is also a video button on the base of the unit that will roll your video clips as well.

As for the MP3 playback, don’t expect award-winning sound quality but it’s certainly adequate for a product with this many additional functions and the tunes will run with or without photo display.

Some might say they would typically only spend around $30-$40 on a desk lamp and Sungale’s MSRP of around $90 is a bit overpriced. Well, we’ll also tell you that the desk lamp part of this equation is a high quality LED lamp (18 LEDs, eye sight protection, 5W consumption, 30,000 operating hours guarantee), so it certainly wasn’t an after thought in “combo” part of the equation.
These combo units generally join unrelated functions to produce a typically mediocre end result as one or more of those functions is usually sub-par. Not the case as here as both the lamp and the frame are solid products.

Certainly a fun and useful gadget gift and the real key here is, it’s a digital frame that might actually get some use.