Orange LivePhoto
Was offered an Orange LivePhoto frame last week as a speaker to Broadband Thursday (btw, you ppl asking me to speak - I really love gadgets 
). The frame itself is pretty cool but too bad I did not get to make it work, I had it join the WiFi alright but the photos.orange.fr website just won’t let me register it … and by the way this online service is really way below Flickr which I use. It’s too bad that potentially good devices which have a nice underlying hardware always suck when it comes to the software around - especially when this thing comes at 199€. This raise a more global issue which is that in the consumer electronics industry, the manufacturers really see no value to the software. Software which in my humble opinion is the most important part of such a product as this is what the users is really in contact with has to fit in less then about 2USD per unit, how can you build something decent with under 100KUSD ? That’s less then 10 man-month worth of work …
Dear CE industry - please listen to this - software matters, great hardware should only come with amazing software - learn from Apple !
Why is the software so poor and the ergonomics of the user interface so unfriendly ?
Please Orange, think experience first !
Despite this is a good and fully featured device.
Frédéric Thuard
17 Mar 08 at 1:08 pm