T-Mobile Quietly Pushing Cameo to Pasture?

Written on Mar 15, 2009 by Brian and filed under News, T-Mobile

T-Mobile released the Cameo digital picture frame last year in a move that was questionable. The 7″ frame wasn’t spectacular and not only did it cost $100, but you had to pay $10/month to get images sent to it via email address. There were other problems too, like you had to have a T-Mobile cell phone plan as well. It looks like T-Mobile has finally given up on their ridiculous experiment, the Cameo is not available online any longer and is on clearance at local stores.

It’s not that we hate what T-Mobile was trying to do. It’s that they pushed out an inferior frame, made by Parrot, and charged an excessive price for both the hardware and service. Total cost of ownership in year one is $220, followed by $120 per year thereafter. The poor economy has nothing to do with it, that’s just flat out expensive and silly, considering there are many services and frames that accomplish the same thing for a better price – free.

The carrier networks make sense in some ways for a project like this, but the cost more than offsets any ease of use gains by using a mobile network instead of WiFi. T-Mobile hasn’t made an official announcement, but we expect to see this project mothballed entirely and it’s unlikely other carriers will be rushing to get in the digital picture frame space any time soon.

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