You had me at "it is ugly" but now "move it no more then 1 foot from the WiFi adapter? Ugh.

The Flickr feeds don't work, you are wasting your time. I'm sending mine back and they can keep their new adapter. (which should have had a right angle plug to begin with)

As an employee of eStarling, I would like to extend my deepest apologies.

We had intended to send you a Steaming Pile, but instead you got a step down on our product ladder.

Please visit your nearest BestBuy customer service department and they will be happy to replace it with the aforementioned model.

The whole idea of having to use the eStarling website doesn't sit well with me. Maybe once someone figures out how to hack this thing to let you use your own domain or some method of pushing things to the frame without the vendor.

... this just stinks of vendor lock-in. I can see it now, "Oops, we're sorry - you can only use the web service for the first year. Now you pay us 10 bucks a month or we send the thugs over to collect the protection money."

Ok, so I exaggerate a little - but you can see where this could go.

By the way, see that uploading email "addess" in the pic above?. That's where you can send us your finest pics and they might show up on the eStarling someday. No goatses, please.

I wasn't going to, but now that you planted that seed in my mind...

The whole idea of having to use the eStarling website doesn't sit well with me. Maybe once someone figures out how to hack this thing to let you use your own domain or some method of pushing things to the frame without the vendor.

And how long until someone starts mass-spamming eStarling? Can you imagine the fun to be had when you realize your picture frame is suddenly indated with all the picture-spam going around? I certainly don't want to look at "H0t st0ck t1p - buy GIZM now!" all day on my picture frame... (I made the stock up - it may be a real one, I don't know. I just thought of something that looked appropriate for the site).

OK, I report my own experience:

Since I did not want to wait for the new power adapter to arrive, I went on and bought a new power adapter that would have enough wattage to power this turkey.

The eStarling support told me to get a power adapter with 2.0A amperage and 6V or 9V voltage. Since I wanted to be sure that the frame will work, I bought an adapter capable of doing both 6V, 7V, 8V, 9V and with a maximum amperage of 3.8A. Plenty of power (I thought) for letting this antenna reach as far as it can.

Since the frame indicated a 6V input, I just tried the 6V/3.8A setting. Fueled with anticipation, I moved the frame to the room next to the WiFi router, and I powered the frame. Full of excitement, I managed to connect; well, sort of. The turkey (aka eStarling frame) could only connect when it had visual contact with the router. Once the door was closed, no connection (the distance was approximately 10 ft and the door is made out of wood). Puzzled, I did the same experiment with the old 6V/1.5A adapter. The behavior was exactly the same.

Actually, after repeated experiments, I realized that the power adapter is not the issue. (Or at least it is not the issue for me.) The behavior of the frame is exactly the same even with the brand new 3.8A amperage adapter. I do not want to think what will happen with the replacement adapter which is a 2.0A one.

Puzzled once again, I decided to pursue further my experiments. I tried the 9V setting, even though I was worried since the frame clearly indicated that the input is 6V. Well, the frame lit up. The color of the eStarling logo was not blue now but a pink/magenta color. Strange, but not alarming. And then, the photos (from the SD card -- no, no RSS feeds either here) started showing up. All the human skin had a wonderful green color, which would have been perfect if we were a family of ET aliens. For homo sapiens, the color was rather freakish. I modified the voltage, setting it to 7V, and 8V. The result was the same. Green skin colors and the blue colors were pink/magenta.

At this point I gave up. I set my frame next to the router. I keeps pinging the eStarling website every 3 minutes or so. However, no RSS feeds. If you send a picture to the estarling.net email, the pictures arrive within 3 or 4 minutes, but no RSS feeds at all.

Strangely enough, a few days back I succeeded in getting the Flickr photos. Not anymore. I guess it is a website problem, but eStarling does not accept this.

Anyway, I just wanted to warn you. Do not have high expectations for the new adapter. Unless the new power adapter is something completely unique, it does not seem to be a problem with the power supply.

My estarling arrived last week. I am impressed with it so far. The pictures look great. I was lucky in that my frame is close to my router so I was not impacted by the adapter issue. After some mucking around with it I got it connected to the network and it is now pulling pictures directly from my Flickr account. While the frame is not perfect (and what first generation product ever is) I am excited to see a frame that can be updated from the web.

My general comments:
-pictures look great on the display
-it took a little while to get it connected to the network but once online it has been workingn since
-I don't love the big logo on the front but other than that I have it proudly displayed on my desk

My personal observations:

1) Can't find any other frames that support e-mailing of photos, RSS or wireless, so I'm sticking to my guns on this product for the time being. I fully expect firmware/website updates to solve the following issues:
a) Device will not boot without WiFi connection (if photos are stored locally, -why- do i need a net connection to boot?)
b) No "status" view on device or website detailing connection errors, or noting last time photos were updated from each photo source (RSS, e-mail, etc.)
c) No way to configure polling interval for RSS/mail. I understand they can't have people polling every minute, but 12 hours is a bit long for RSS updates, imho. Even a button to force an initial photo pull when you setup a new source and a "success" or "failure" message would be sufficient.
d) No way to mass-upload files to the device without using flickr uploadr (see #5) or a memory card.
e) No way to control the transitions between photos
f) According to my parents (to whom I gave the frame as a Christmas gift) the device freezes intermittently, and somewhat frequently (once per day at least, if device is not powered off at night.) A hard reboot (unplug/replug) is required to get it working again. Has anyone else experienced this instability?
e) Must rotate/resize images before uploading to the site.
f) The site itself is bloody slow!

2) External WiFi adapter?

3) Black plastic portion of the frame is wider/larger than I had expected, but I can live with it. Logo on the frame is unnecessary, a device like this doesn't have to be branded (A:Where did you get that cool frame? B:Oh, it's from eStarling!) Are normal picture frames branded? No. I'm thinking of crocheting a cozy for it, will post pics if I have a chance ;)

4) I agree with other users, the packaging/website seem to be rushed/unpolished. Wording in documentation and on the site is also not quite natural.

5) Just a note for flickr users, I have word from Flickr tech support that there is (currently) no way to share "private" photos via an RSS feed. The photos must all be publicly viewable to expose them via RSS. This sucks, because currently flickr is the only option if you want to mass upload files to the device easily (see #1d) and I dont want all my vacation shots in the public domain.

6) I was a bit disappointed that the wonder of the device isn't in the device itself: it's in the website. AFAIK, the fact that you are locked into using the eStarling site was not advertised on ThinkGeek, nor anywhere else. All they have is a little box with a wireless card that polls the website and downloads/displays the images. The actual RSS/e-mail/magic is all done by their servers: an insecure solution that doesn't sit well with me. Cool? Well, yes it is. $250 cool? Now that I know how it works? Not so much. Now that I've seen everything that's on the market, the tinker in me is seeing a better, more marketable solution. I didnt want this to become another do-it-yourself project, but...

As for hacking the device, it wouldn't be difficult to find out how it pulls the images unless they use some funky proprietary protocol, which is -highly- unlikely. Just snoop/tcpdump the traffic to/from the device while it's booting up and running to see what it's up to. My guess is that it just pulls the addresses of the images via RSS from the eStarling site (see the "Your eStarling RSS Feed" link while viewing your photos on the site) and then grabs the image data with straight HTTP.
If someone reading this has the inclination, try NATting frame.estarling.com (208.109.21.26) to your personal Apache server and see if you get any http hits from the picture frame. If I had had more time to fiddle with the thing while I was home for the holidays I would have...

Anyway, will update later on :)