Sungale’s recently unleashed a WiFi-enabled, widget-having digital photo frame — the ID800WT — and the fine folks over at Zatz Not Funny have taken it for a little spin. The 800 x 600 resolution touchscreen boasts 512 MB of internal storage, and widgets for weather, news, Picasa, YouTube, Gmail, and Internet radio. The reviewer didn’t find the widgets to be particularly awesome, in many respects — their implementation, for instance, made the Gmail app “nearly useless” because it displayed only a few lines at a time, and many had trouble connecting to the internet properly. It wasn’t all doom and gloom, however — they really liked the frame in theory, and thought that the company was shooting for the right idea — they just didn’t actually succeed. The frame will be available sometime in the coming month for about $165.

Well, there was some evidence earlier this month that some piracy issues in China’s mandated “Green Dam” content-filtering software could cause PC exports to the country to be stalled, but it looks like Sony has now gone ahead and included the software on its PCs regardless, albeit with a few major caveats. According to the document above (included with a VAIO PC sold in the country, and translated by RConversation’s Rebecca MacKinnon), Sony says that it is including the software “in accordance with government requirements,” but that it “cannot guarantee the authenticity, legality, or compatibility of the software’s content, function, service or any other feature.” It’s also apparently only including the program on the hard drive and providing installation instructions, rather than providing it completely pre-installed itself. Still no word from any of the other major PC manufacturers, it seems, but you can be sure this won’t be the last word on the matter.

[Via TG Daily]

Researchers at the Fraunhofer Institute — partnered with project HYPOLED — have created an OLED mini projector prototype for mobile phones. Unlike many previous iterations of similar technologies, this new prototype doesn’t need an additional illumination system, instead relying on a lens system to project images produced by an OLED onto a screen or wall — making it both smaller and more energy efficient. The prototype currently displays a monochrome image with a brightness of 10,000 candelas per square meter, and color images with a brightness of about half of that. The lenses are also made of glass at this point, though cheaper and simpler plastic ones are in the works. No word on when we might see these prototypes hitting the streets in actual projector phones, though.

[Via Gizmag]