Jan 8, 2019

When Electric Objects was bought by Giphy, the company soon shutdown the hardware team and got rid of the subscription fees for existing content. While Meural actually bumped up its annual subscription after getting acquired by Netgear , the company is also continuing to release new hardware. The company just took the wraps off its Meural 3.0 art display. Its latest offering doesn’t shake things up too much. There’s no Netgear router embedded beneath the display. The new release is all about a sleeker more modern design for the smart art screen, alongside a new smaller 21.5″ size designed to bring a cheaper entry price (though pricing has oddly not been finalized yet) and some nice size contrast with the 27″ model so people can get all crazy with Instagram-friendly gallery layouts. The frames come in black, white, light wood and dark wood designs. While you were totally stuck with whatever frame you initially purchased in previous gen designs, the new look also brings modularity so if you have a change of heart or need to adapt your art display to a new look you’ll be able to swap frames easily. The company’s working to bring more art collections to its subscription product, and will be adding collections from National Geographic, Norman Rockwell & Saturday Evening Post, and The Little Prince. Specs obviously only matter so much on a device like this, which is still very much exclusively designed for showcasing artwork. That being said, it’s rocking 8GB of onboard memory, 2GB of RAM and a quad-core 1.8 Ghz CPU. It being a Netgear company now, the company has updated the WiFi chipset as well with the goal of “mor stable, higher performance.” The display has been updated to be more power efficient as well, using about 20 percent less energy than previous generations. Still waiting on a price and release date for the new displays though the previous-gen 27″ screen started at $595.