Aura Carver smart digital picture frame 10.1 inch HD WiFi cloud digital frame review

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Is there any free storage in Aura Carver smart digital picture frame 10.1 inch HD WiFi cloud digital frame? Invite unlimited friends and family to share pictures to your frame or send photos to their frames all via WiFi. Alexa Compatible. Instantly share photos with ease from your phone to an Aura digital photo frame through our easy-to-use app. Easily Send 10,000+ photos from your phone to any digital picture frame.

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Pros & Cons – Aura Carver smart digital picture frame 10.1 inch HD WiFi cloud digital frame

Pros

  • Bright, vivid display with very good off-axis viewing
  • Free and unlimited cloud storage
  • Excellent app, software and user interface
  • Can be set-up for gifting
  • Solid, sturdy design
  • Very detailed screen
  • Simple streamlined set-up
  • Intelligently pairs portrait photos

Cons

  • Brightness can’t be manually adjusted
  • Landscape orientation only
  • No user-accessible local storage
  • Touch strip interface can be finicky
  • WiFi network required

Specs – Aura Carver smart digital picture frame 10.1 inch HD WiFi cloud digital frame

  • Large 10.1″ landscape orientation screen with 1920×1200, 224 PPI pixel resolution
  • Dimensions: 10.63 x 2.6 x 7.45 inches / 270 x 66 x 188 mm
  • Touch screen: No
  • Wi-Fi: Yes
  • 5′ custom braided fabric power cord
  • Select the favorite photos with a double tap on the touch bar
  • Presence sensor helps pick the right photo at the right time
  • Compatible with iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch running iOS 11 or later or Android 5.0 or later.
  • Remote: No
  • Built-in storage: No
  • Ambient light sensor automatically adjusts display brightness
  • Change photos with the touch-sensitive bar on the top of the frame
  • Motion sensor: Yes
  • Video: No
  • USB/SD slots: No/No
  • Cloud services: Google Photos

Price

The $199 Aura Carver is an attractive digital frame with unlimited cloud storage, You can get a much more functional smart display of the same size for just $30 more in the form of the Amazon Echo Show 10 or the Google Nest Hub Max, or if you want to save money and don’t mind a slightly smaller screen, you can pick up the Amazon Echo Show 8 or the Google Nest Hub for around half the price.

Aura Carver smart digital picture frame 10.1 inch HD WiFi cloud digital frame review

Build

The Carver has a minimalist design, available in black or white, with flat, angular bezels that match a near-pyramid extension on the back that serves as a stand. An antidote to displaying single portrait photos with big black borders in a landscape-oriented frame, the AI-powered Intelligent Pairing mode uses (according to Aura) a “sophisticated algorithm” to pair “related” photos and display them side-by-side.

Design

It measures 7.5 by 10.6 by 2.6 inches (HWD), with a 10.1-inch, 1,920-by-1,200 LCD. A small, touch-sensitive control strip sits on the top edge, marking the only physical controls. The frame doesn’t even have a power button; it automatically turns on when you plug the power adapter into the back.

Aspect Ratio

The display has an aspect ratio of 16:10 which is great because this means that there is only little cropping of images taken with your phone camera. For us passionate photographers, this is a very important feature.

Control

 You can control the Aura Carver with voice commands via Alexa or Google Assistant, although the process is too clunky to be of much use. With both Alexa and Google Assistant, you must first open the Aura Frames skill (“Alexa, open Aura Frames”) before issuing any commands, and in both cases the list of available commands (“show me the next photo,” “where was that photo taken”) is pretty basic. In most cases, you’re better off simply using the touch strip rather than asking Alexa or Google Assistant for help.

Display

The good news is that the Carver’s screen is bright, sharp, and colorful, reproducing photos accurately with no noticeable pixelation. The Carver’s 10.1-inch IPS display has a 1920 x 1200 resolution, which comes out to 224 pixels per inch.

Touch bar

On top of the frame there is a small smooth strip. It has the same color as the frame and is hardly visible but you feel it right away. With the touch bar, you can move on to the next image, move back, display available information about an image like the location and the date, and by whom it was added.

By repeatedly tapping on the touch bar, you can also make a lot of hearts appear. This information is shared with the person who uploaded the image which is a nice way of giving feedback.

Storage

The Carver doesn’t have onboard storage for photos, and instead relies on Aura’s unlimited cloud storage. This means you can put as many pictures as you want on the frame, but it also means the frame’s use depends entirely on Aura’s servers running, and on it being connected to Wi-Fi at all times.

Privacy

All your images are stored on Aura’s cloud server, which is powered by Amazon Web Services and protected by AES-256 encryption. In its privacy policy, Aura promises that only you and those you choose to share the frame with will have access to your photos, although Aura says it will analyze your snapshots in order to do a better job of grouping them together (more about that in a moment) while skipping duplicates and fuzzy images.

How to setup

To set up the Carver and load photos onto it, you need to download the Aura app for Android or iOS. It’s a fairly simple process to use the app to connect to the frame, then connect the frame to your Wi-Fi network. Once it’s set up, you can load it with photos.

Aura frame app

The Aura Frames app gets photos from your smartphone or tablet’s camera roll as well as from cloud services like iCloud or Google Photos. Once paired with that app, Carver displays each photo in a curated slideshow for 10 minutes as default. However, it can flash up a photo for as little as 15 seconds, or for as long as 24 hours, before advancing to the next one. 

Carver shows newly-added photos first, with older photos shuffled behind them, though the user can swipe left or right on the Carver’s Touch Bar to move to the previous or next photo. 

How to use Aura Carver smart digital picture frame 10.1 inch HD WiFi cloud digital frame?

The Aura app lets you put photos on the Carver from your phone’s own storage, or from Google Photos by linking the Aura app to your Google account. Going through photos on your phone is quick and easy, but if you have thousands of photos backed up on Google, it will require some time. The app took hours to populate my years-old photo library, and browsing the entire feed of photos was too slow to be functional. I eventually went into Google Photos and set up a separate album with photos specifically for the frame. That too took some time to populate from my dozens of different albums, but eventually I could simply display my favorite images from different trips on the frame with a few taps.

How to send email?

The next area is a button to add a member to the group of people who may contribute photos. Additional contributors are invited over email. Once the invitee gets the email they are directed to a page where they can get the app or accept the invitation to add via the web. It seems this depends on how the web page where the invitee responds to the email identifies itself – on the web, an android device, pr an iOS device. After the app is installed they need to sign up for an Aura account with an email and create a password. After that step, they can return to the invitation email to accept the invitation. The invitations are good for 1 month.

Alternate of Aura Carver smart digital picture frame 10.1 inch HD WiFi cloud digital frame

Nixplay Smart Photo Frame 10.1 Inch Touch

Specs
  • Resolution: 1200 x 800
  • Dimensions: 10.55 x 7.4 x 1.53 inches
  • Wi-Fi: YesTouch screen: Yes
  • Remote: No
  • Built-in storage: 8GB (minus pre-installed software)
  • Motion sensor: Yes
  • Music player: Yes
  • Video: Yes
  • USB/SD slots: No/No
  • Cloud services: Facebook, Instagram, Dropbox, Flickr, Google Photos
Pros

+Excellent high resolution image quality

+Touch screen makes navigation easy

+Good online/social media image access via apps

+Includes a motion sensor

Cons

-No onboard SD cards or memory sticks

Friends and family can easily upload photos to this frame from their own Nixplay account or email them in directly. There’s great social media image access as well, including Facebook, Google Photos, Instagram, Dropbox, Flickr, and Verison. There’s very little to complain about this frame, other than the lack of onboard SD cards or memory sticks. There’s no remote to lose, it’s intuitive to operate and design is simple, yet sophisticated.

The Nixplay Smart Photo Frame 10.1 Inch Touch is the latest addition to company’s range of digital frames. It offers a compact midsize design which will fit in to most rooms and the display is bright enough to add character to your images and really make the landscapes ‘pop’. It won’t waste electricity, thanks to the voice and motion activated sensors, and it couldn’t be more easy to use with the touch screen navigation. Because of this, it would suit those who are new or experienced with this kind of product. Advertisement

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Abu Saleh Rizvee
Abu Saleh Rizvee

I love to write content and contribute for my society. I invest my days in creating content for products those I love and brands who need online presence

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