The frame's viewable area is 10 inches diagonally--about 8.25 inches wide by 6.25 inches high. The responsive 800-by-600-pixel SVGA LCD touchscreen has a matte surface, and the frame itself is made of matte black or silver plastic. The Vizit is extremely lightweight, with a thin, plasticky feeling, articulating support that folds down in back. The support's faux-wood paneling surprised us--is Isabella aiming for a retro look retro rather than a high-tech one? Not entirely: Unlike the classic-looking Kodak frames, the Vizit has no mat. In any event, the unit's '70s wood paneling style doesn't look particularly classy or sturdy.
Like many other digital photo frames, the Vizit lets you set it up in two ways: mounted on a wall or displayed on a desk or coffee table (it looks better to us in freestanding mode). Either way, it must be tethered to an AC cord, since there's no battery back-up option. Like most energy-efficient digital photo frames, the Vizit includes an option for setting an automatic shutoff time.
As with the T-Mobile-linked , you can arrange to authorize friends and family members to send photos directly from their e-mail accounts or cell phones to the Vizit, using the AT&T network. The Isabella frame makes photo transfer exceedingly easy for anyone, with no need for card-swapping or USB flash drives.
To arrange for others to send photos to your frame, simply create an account at the , enter your frame's ID, and identify the individuals you authorize to e-mail photos to the frame (or to send via phone). On top of the $280 you pay of the frame, you must purchase a basic or premium photo plan that includes photo management, third party content, ywo-way photo sharing and cellular connectivity. According to our contact at Isabella, the basic plan costs $6 per month ($72 per year, capped at 50 photos received per month), while the premium costs $80 per year (capped at 60 photos received per month). Isabella's plans include support (eventually) for Flickr and Photobucket.
You can upload 16 photos at a time to the frame via your Vizit account online. The site is currently in beta, which may explain some of the difficulties we ran into when trying to use it. In our hands-on tests, Firefox crashed twice as we were uploading images. And some photos took forever to appear on the frame after we uploaded them to our account, despite their relatively small file sizes.