Published: Thursday, 24 Sep 2009 | 10:39 AM ET

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Don’t look now, but the world is being taken over by widgets.

HP

Widgets are compact, single-purpose programs. One shows the weather. Another, stocks. One might display David Letterman’s daily Top 10 list, or Times headlines, or Twitter updates.

Widgets began life on computer screens (as shareware programs like Konfabulator, then as a built-in feature of Mac OS X and Windows Vista). Then came the Chumby, a cute desktop beanbag with a screen that shows widgets all day. Then Yahoo

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[YHOO  Loading...      ()   ] teamed up with manufacturers to build widgets into TV sets. When you get right down to it, even those 75,000 iPhone apps are widgets.

It didn’t take long for someone to think: “Hey, that Chumby’s a neat idea — but why a bean bag? Why not something people already put on their desks — like a picture frame?”

That’s all the introduction you need for today’s lesson: a case study of two companies’ approaches to the same problem.

In this corner, the DreamScreen from Hewlett-Packard

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[HPQ  Loading...      ()   ]. It’s available in 10- and 13-inch versions for $250 and $300. In that corner, Toshiba’s less attractively named DMF82XKU (8 inches, $180) and DMF102XKU (10 inches, $230). Each can play music, display photos and present widgets — radio, scores, headlines and other Web goodies — wirelessly grabbed from the Internet.

Both are sleek wide-screen displays with a one-inch margin of glossy black; the Toshiba, with its fine transparent acrylic border, looks slightly classier. Each comes with a tiny, cheap plastic remote control whose buttons require considerable force, but you can also summon hidden illuminated touch controls by tapping on either frame. They come in handy when you lose the remote.

Each frame is meant to sit on a desk, but the H.P. can also hang on a wall.

You can load up either frame with photos, videos and unprotected music files by inserting a memory card, a U.S.B. flash drive or a U.S.B. cable connected to a Mac or PC.

Photos look terrific; both frames easily fulfill the primary mission of a digital photo frame, gracefully changing the image once every few seconds, every few hours or every day. (You can even rotate the Toshiba 90 degrees; the image rotates to match.)

But that’s where the similarities end.

Toshiba’s frame lets you subscribe to any of 1,000 widgets at Framechannel.com. It’s a fantastic variety: BBC. Facebook updates. Twitter posts. Favorite sports teams. Concert info. Cartoons. Trivia. Horoscopes. Local traffic. Channel after channel of gorgeous photography. Both the Toshiba frame and the Framechannel.com site, where you load it up, are challenging to figure out. (Incidentally, many other companies sell Framechannel-enabled frames, but the new Toshiba is a good representative of the genre.)

The Toshiba’s software design over all, in fact, is somewhat baffling. It consists of simple lists of text commands, but at least it’s quick and efficient.

The DreamScreen from H.P., on the other hand, has a lush, colorful, icon-driven software design. The company thinks it’s really onto something; a public relations person calls it “a breakthrough new platform.”

Well, that might be pushing it.

The widgets are far more limited than the Toshiba’s; each represents an individual deal made by H.P. (as opposed to Framechannel’s public-bazaar approach). They include Clock, Facebook, Weather and, for Web photos, Snapfish. (Snapfish? Not Flickr?) You can’t add any new ones, although H.P. says that it will, through software updates.

Some of them are handy — especially the Pandora radio widget, which tailors its music selections according to your tastes (you rate each song as it plays). The clock options are beautiful: analog or digital, clock with photo, clock with calendar, clock with foreign-city time and so on.

Others are less impressive. The Calendar, for example, shows a handsome month-view — with nothing on it, and no way to add anything to it. Guess it’s useful if you want to know what day of the week the 23rd falls on.

The speakers are stereo and sound better and richer than the Toshiba’s. The H.P. has a slot on top for the remote; the Toshiba does not. There’s a jack for a wired network, which the Toshiba lacks.

Unfortunately, in terms of polish and design finesse, the DreamScreen might better be called the NightmareScreen.

Over and over again, the software gets in your way. You can’t hear the different alarm sounds as you scroll through them. There’s no indication on the frame that the alarm has been set. The audio and video get out of sync during the frame’s tutorial videos.

On options screens, like the one where you set up your clock, the settings appear in a tall column. If you want to adjust only one of them — Clock Style, the first option — you would think that pressing O.K. on the remote would mean “I’m finished, take me back.” But no. You have to walk all the way down the screen, using the remote’s arrow buttons, past all of the other options, to highlight the O.K. button on the screen, and then press the O.K. button on the remote to “click” that. It’s exhausting.

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