Don’t look now, but the world is being taken by by widgets.

Widgets are compact, single-purpose programs. One shows the weather. Another, stocks. One might display newspaper headlines or Twitter updates.

Widgets began life on computer screens. next came the Chumby, a cute desktop beanbag with a screen that shows widgets all day. soon after Yahoo teamed up with manufacturers to build widgets into television sets. When you get right down to it, even those 75,000 iPhone apps are widgets.

It didn’t take expanded for someone to think: “Hey, that Chumby’s a neat concept — but why a bean bag? Why not something society already put on their desks — like a picture frame?”

That’s all the introduction you need for the lesson for today: a case study of two companies’ approaches to the same problem.

In that corner, the DreamScreen from Hewlett-Packard. It’s available in 10- and 13-inch versions, 25 and 33 centimeters, for $250 and $300. In that corner, Toshiba’s less attractively named DMF82XKU (8 inches, $180) and DMF102XKU (10 inches, $230). Each can play music, display photos and present widgets — radio, sports scores, headlines and other goodies — wirelessly grabbed from the Web.

Both are sleek displays with margins of glossy black; the Toshiba, with a transparent acrylic border, looks slightly classier. Each comes with a tiny, cheap plastic remote control whose buttons require considerable force to press, but you can additionally summon hidden touch controls by tapping on either frame.

Each wide-screen frame is meant to sit on a desk, but the DreamScreen can additionally hang on a wall. You can load up either frame with photos, videos and unprotected music files by inserting a memory card, a USB flash drive or a USB cable connected to a Mac or PC.

Photos look terrific; both frames easily fulfill the primary mission of a digital…

[Source] dhiram