Sanyo ALBO Home Network Viewer 7-Inch WiFi Photo Frame

Another day, another set of tiny desktop LCDs that most of us can't buy.  Akihabara have been playing with Sanyo's ALBO Home Network Viewer, a 7-inch 800 x 480 LCD with integrated WiFi b/g, memory card slots and infrared receiver.  It also automatically flips from portrait to landscape when you physically rotate the display.

Sanyo intend the ALBO to be used as a digital photo viewer – pulling images from memory cards, transferred via IR from cellphones, and streamed from Picasa web albums – as an RSS reader and as an email viewer.  It has 256MB of internal memory and runs Windows CE 5.0 behind the scenes.  MP3, WMA and WAV audio can be played back through internal speakers.

So far, so good.  The first problem is that Sanyo don't seem to have any intention of releasing the ALBO Home Network Viewer outside of the Far East.  The second is the price: at 40,000 Yen ($423) you could buy a very large standard LCD for that, or even a full netbook.