Award-winning Czech hand-held device holds up to 40,000 photos

The Czech-made electronic device Album2 won an Innovations 2010 Design and Engineering award earlier this month at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, the world’s biggest new technology trade fair. Album2 is described as a portable digital photogallery and was designed by the company Albumteam based in the north Bohemian town of Jablonec. On the line from there, the man who invented it, Dalibor Dědek, described the device.

“Album is a digital photogallery. People today are generating plenty of digital pictures, but if you think about it, most of the pictures are never seen. Because the other side, I mean the way we look at the pictures, is very limited, unless you carry your computer with you.

“So we created something you can carry with you. It’s a portable device which is the size of an ordinary photograph print-out and you can store directly from your camera up to 40,000 pictures onto the internal memory. It’s battery powered, so wherever you go you can show all your pictures.”

How is different about Album2, for which you won the award at the Consumer Electronics Show?

“What I’ve been talking about was the initial idea behind Album1. Because Album1, which was introduced last year, got quite an interesting response in the market, we implemented some new features.

“The first one is that it can also play videos. That means if you make short family videos or something like that you can also watch them on the album. The breaking improvement was the implementation of Wi-Fi connectivity. So apart from viewing pictures which are in the internal memory, you can go on-line and see pictures from Picasa or Youtube or other things.”

How does it differ from, for example, an iPhone, which also holds photos and can also connect you to web applications?

“This device is dedicated to the purpose, which is showing pictures. So the screen is larger – it has a diameter of 18 centimetres, which is the size of a real picture.

“The other thing is that if you want to download pictures to your iPhone you have to fiddle with your computer, because they can’t be downloaded directly from the camera.

“The iPhone is something like a Swiss Army knife. It can definitely be a useful tool if you need it [laughs], but I don’t think people are using a Swiss Army knife to do their manicure, even if it’s equipped with a scissors….We wanted to make something dedicated, which really matches the purpose.”

Photo: www.albumteam.com