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This is the opening post in a series of “Bridging the Geek Gap” posts intended to find the common ground between geeks and non-geeks, and the gadgets that will appeal to everyone.

Lets face it, being a geek in the real world is hard. People don’t understand us. We talk about BAUD rates and Bandwidth and their eyes glaze over like a Christmas ham. The proliferation of internet use has helped a bit, but it hasn’t really advanced the cause of the electronics. Sure most households have a computer, many have more than one, but how many have real gadgets; the fun toys that geeks love and mundanes mock?

So where’s the common ground? Where’s our meeting point? What gizmo pleases everybody? In this series, we’ll those address those questions.

First gadget on the list: the Digital Photo Frame.

You’ve been to people’s home and offices and you’ve seen the same pictures for years. The kids grow, but the pictures stay the same. It always bothered me that I could never guess the ages of people’s kids from the pictures in their offices or homes. Not anymore.

As with all picture frames, it’s important that you find the frame that best matches your room. Luckily, the come in various finishes from classic wood finish to choose your own look . Mine is basic black.

Size does matter. While I don’t object to 5″ pictures in theory, in practice, I really preferred at least the 7″ screen unless you’re working with a small space to fill. Tastes will differ, so again, judge it by your surroundings, but generally I wouldn’t expect to go smaller than that unless you’re actually planning to carry it around with you, (but keychain photo albums are a different subject entirely, we’ll save it for another day)

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Ease of use is critical. If it takes more than two, clicks, Mom is going to give up. Luckily most all digital picture frames come with a handy remote with the all-powerful “slideshow” button. Press the button and that’s it. Obviously there’s some setup involved, choose how long each picture displays, stretch image, or display with original aspect ratio, transition effects, etc, but aside from intentionally performing setup tasks, if it takes more than two clicks to get from power on to picture, it’s not going to get used.

Memory cards -vs- internal memory -vs- wireless. We had a commenter on a previous post insist that wireless is a must. Wireless is a geek thing. I like wireless. Wireless allows you, the geek, to download your photos directly into your non-geek family’s picture frame. Not much downside in that.

Beyond that, it’s really a personal choice. If you or the people in your family or you have digital cameras, make sure whatever card your camera is using is supported by your picture frame. Not all frames support all cards. In our family, we have MemoryStick (Dad, Brother, Husband), CF (Me), and SD (2 sisters, and some parents). Any frame we get has to support all of us, so pictures can home easily from any source. All picture frames do have USB, so they’ll usually take USB drives as well.

The digital picture frame, a gadget that brings the family together.

If you have any gadgets that cross the geek-line into mainstream culture, feel free to suggest them for consideration in this series.