While it can be wonderful to see your photographs pop brightly on an LCD screen, to slowly transition through the artful movements of a slideshow playing a nostalgic tune, it still falls short for many people of the experience of handing a traditional photo album to a friend and watching them flip through it. Kodak’s newest digital photo frame takes the first steps towards closing that gap. With a rechargeable battery and touch controls, you can pluck the frame from its perch on your desk or bookshelf and hand it across the couch or around a sitting room for others to look through, flipping through pictures with a tap of a finger.

The Kodak EasyShare S730 offers a 7” display with a resolution of 800 x 400. While that’s now considered average for digital frames, its pictures are still larger than most paper albums. Like many LCD screens the viewing angle isn’t perfect, it’s quite fine when you’re looking at it dead on, from above, and even from the extreme left and right, but oddly enough it’s when you look up at the screen from below that the image breaks up in a haze. With a widescreen 16:9 aspect ratio, the quality of the screen is quite good in terms of colour and clarity for its resolution.

With a thick, burgundy frame, it’s quite an attractive unit that will fit in with most décor choices, matching both light, natural settings as well as dark, masculine interiors. A substantial kick stand on the back, both very wide and thick in its design, rotates securely on a joint allowing it to support both portrait and landscape modes without the risk of easily collapsing or breaking, an issue that afflicts most digital frames.

Sensors give the frame its magic. An accelerometer allows it to know which way you’re holding it and to switch between portrait and landscape modes to match. A proximity detector lets it know when your fingers or hands are near the screen, which in turn set off the backlit system allowing for the hidden touch controls along the border to appear, glowing softly with an orange hue.

There are seven touch “buttons” along the border, each one activated when you place a finger against it. The first five are simple dots along the left side, used for navigating menus and playback. It’s a bit confusing at first, to follow the changing path of arrows, play icons, and menu lists. The two additional buttons sit beneath the screen on the lower right, offering simple forwards and backwards controls for skipping through slideshows and collections. While the presentation of these touch controls is attractive, the way they softly fade away after use, their arrangement could be simpler still.

Once you disconnect the frame from its AC adapter, its rechargeable lithium-ion battery kicks in to provide about an hour’s worth of use. That, combined with the 1 GB internal memory (good for approx. 8000 photos), make it a bit thicker and heavier than most frames and more than you’d expect picking it up for the first time.

While the quality of the speakers is quite fine, they face out the rear and enough of the sound is lost in the wrong direction to give playback a slightly tinny quality. An audio out jack lets you connect the frame instead to a stereo or pair of bookshelf speakers and card slots allow you to play content from a wide variety of memory card types – SD, SDHC, MMC, xD, Memory Stick and Memory Stick Duo along with USB drives and a USB cable connection to your computer for simple drag-and-drop transfers.

As with their previous frames, Kodak has packed the EasyShare S730 with software features. You can divide the screen to display a desk clock or calendar and use them both to program the frame to automatically turn on and off at set times of the day. It can display multiple photos in a collage and can customize slideshows with MP3s, different timed intervals, and transition effects that include zooms, pans, and multiple wipes. You can also choose how pictures will fill the display or be letterboxed and can pick through thumbnails to create temporary playlists.

There are two surprises. If you don’t feel like sifting through thousands of photos the Picture Finder will group them by which day they were taken and “Perfect Touch” will adjust each photo to better match the display properties of the LCD screen which is bound to be different from the one on your laptop.

When shopping for a digital frame quality is always key, you want an LCD screen with a decent viewing angle and playback that will match your computer’s where you edit and touch up your photos. Although a bit small for a hi-tech frame, if you’re aiming at those willing to pay extra for quality I say go for a few more inches in display, but at $129.95 the EasyShare S730 is priced less than I expected. The touch controls and battery actually do the job intended, they turn the frame into an album you can share, but fade when you just need a frame, nothing more. Launching this week, the EasyShare S730 will only be available online through Kodak.ca