My 770 has been gathering dust since May when I bought a Nokia N95 and realized I could get along pretty well with just that and nothing else. (I love you N95! Don't ever leave me!) I tried selling it, but when nobody bit I thought, well, I've always wanted a digital picture frame to views lots of photos on... maybe the 770 would be good for that?

So I found Quiver, the photo viewer, and it seems to work fairly well for a barebones slideshow effect. I'm not sure the underpowered 770 could handle any cool transitions, and I like Quiver's scrollable thumbnail interface during slideshow mode. When running, it even seems to disable the 770's built-in screen dim function, which was a big hurdle for this idea. But here are my remaining questions:

1. Is there a way to read Flickr streams and display them as full screen slideshows? The one Flickr app I found (on Maemo) doesn't seem to handle much in the way of automation.

2. How long can I pull this off before I burn out my 770's screen? I really don't want to ruin it by January 2008.

3. Along those same lines, is there a solution that would let me turn the screen on and off at certain times of the day automatically, so that I could leave it plugged in in one place and never deal with powering it on or off, but also not waste electricity when I'm not around to look at it?

I can develop in Flash using ActionScript 2.0, but that's about the extent of my programming capabilities, so I'm trying to see if there are existing apps out there that I could chain together to get some sort of final picture-frame effect that I'd be happy with.

Any ideas?

I have the family album on my mmc card. I just use the Image Viewer that comes installed. I crop things to the 800x480 aspect ratio. Image Viewer has full screen, and the joystick controls get you to the next/previous. It also has zoom in and out.

Before electronics, I used a photo album. It was high tech. You insert your photos into plastic sleeves. I had my film printed on 4"x6", because that's the aspect ratio of the negative in the 35mm format. 3"x5" does arbitrary cropping. There were no fading effects, no nothing, just flip to the next. It also supports flipping to the previous, quickly going to the first or last shots.

The 770 screen is very good for this sort of thing. The dots are really small. Active color is better than passive (a print) because you can get wider depth of color with projection. The 16 bit color does better than expected - and has the feel of 24 bit color. For this to be perfect, each color has to be used, on average, for about 6 pixels on this 800x480 screen. That's OK.

My audience appreciates it when my photo album is short. Just the best shots. My family album has maybe eight shots right now. I think they'll like it.

I blame gratuitous fades and other effects on PowerPointless.

But the 770 can do full screen video, at least with the DSP. So gratuitous effects are not beyond it's power. It's just a matter of software.

can you simply make the n770 show a web page from your server, with a meta refresh, and then have a simple CGI on the web server to generate a random page?

as to turning the display on and off by time of day, would a simple cron job be sufficient?

ideally, use a movement detector (passive infrared thing with a relay attachment to an adapted USB mouse's button?) so that it goes into deep sleep mode until someone is near.

I made an old Ibm Thinkpad into a digital Photo frame a few years ago, I mounted it in an old photo frame, and matted the screen to the edges of the visible portion.
you could do the same, and you would have the option of removing it at a later date if that was what you wanted to do.

Also, if you still want to sell it, I would give you a fair price for it, (or someone else, I am looking for a 770, I don't want an 800.
-Ezra