One of only two Nokia products to boast a hard drive, Nokia's Image Album PD-1 makes short work of images, video and messages - with the occasional hiccup. A review by Sindre Lia.
Review summary of the Nokia Image Album PD-1:
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 Price: $250.
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Full Nokia Image Album PD-1 Review:
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Nokia's answer to the need for more storage capacity for digital images, video clips and messages is the Nokia Image Album, sporting an internal 20 GB hard disk drive. Weighing in at 300 g and measuring 22.2 x 15 x 4.6 cm, the Image Album connects to PAL and NTSC TV's through either a RCA cable or a scart adapter.
On start-up, the familiar "Nokia Connecting People" intro appears, subsequent to which the icon-based user interface which is operated in the same manner as a Nokia smartphone is loaded. Navigation and text input is handled by a small and light remote control, equipped with a keypad that's quite similar to the one found in the Nokia 3650.
Unfortunately, that particular keypad doesn't belong to the group of the most intuitive keypads available, but in a minor display of brilliance, Nokia fortunately included an application that enables the use of a Nokia smartphone as a remote control via Bluetooth. Another application that was included made swift work of transferring SMS and MMS messages to the Image Album.
Files can be transferred to the Image Album via Infrared or Bluetooth, with the PD-1 also incorporating USB 1.1 and USB Host connectivity to enable users to directly interface with both computers and digital cameras. Considering the Image Album also sports a SD/MMC memory card slot, connectivity options are quite comprehensive.
The Image Album offers a long list of supported file formats, including JPEG and GIF for images, AMR and WAV for audio, and MPEG4, MPEG1, H.263 and MJPEG for video. Unlike other Nokia products such as the recently reviewed Image Frame SU-7, the PD-1 had no problems tackling images with resolutions above 1.3 Megapixels, handling a test batch of 5 Megapixel stills admirably. Video performance was adequate, but the PD-1 has clearly not been designed with entertainment in mind as supported resolutions and frame rates are limited to what most typical handsets are able to produce.
Organizing and searching through files stored on the Image Album was a trouble-free and pleasant experience until an issue with the timestamp on images appeared. Due to an inexplicable bug, all images appear to be given the same timestamp when transferred to the Image Album, negating the possibility of sorting and searching for images by date; a marring flaw.
Furthermore, the PD-1 also ingeniously lets users add comments to pictures, but fails to provide any means of notifying users of when comments are present either in thumbnail or full view mode. This could easily have been resolved through the inclusion of a small, yet transparent icon - at least there's a dedicated remote control button which provides quick access to the comments field.
Availability
The Nokia Image Album is currently available in Europe and North America at approximately €300 EUR or $250 USD.
Price and availability
The Nokia Image Album PD-1 will start selling for $250 () in November 1999.
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