The Adapt Pico Play, projecting family favourites whatever the location

As mobile handsets begin to over an array of different ways to display your content on your personal computer or television via HMDI or even a 3.5mm headphone jack, you would think it odd to consider projecting the media stored on your phone.

Truth be known, there are a number of different devices available that connect to your smartphone, allowing you to project the photos and videos you have taken of your friend and family. Just last week, we took delivery a new personal projector, the Adapt Pico Play, the smallest personal projector on the market that is actually lighter and shorter than an iPhone.

Opening the box, the Pico Play is seriously small. Bundled with an array of cables, including an iPhone connector, the mini-projector supports external media via a SD card reader, a USB connection or via its own 1GB internal storage.

When the Pico Play is switched on, the device, by default, displays any media stored on the device. For our tests, we connected an iPhone 4 expecting the projector to instantly display the home screen of the Apple smartphone. A quick click of the menu button on the Pico Play allows the user to select an AV-input, opening up the option to display photos and videos on your iPhone.

Due to the restrictions placed on devices by Apple, the only way media can be projected is to start a slideshow on the device itself. Once selected, the Pico Play will instantly kick into life, transitioning between photos and videos and outputting them on a surface with screen sizes up to 54 inches with an impressive 8 lumens of brightness.

The Pico Play outputs sound but it will be a case of finding the right distance to set the projector to get the best results. In our tests, the projector struggled to output videos past a distance of around 6 feet, but the quality was very watchable at distances inclusive of that mark.

Adding media via an SD card, the Pico Play displays an aesthetic file manager that allows you to quickly and easily move between folders and display MPEG videos and photos. We ran the device for around an hour and the battery indicator indicated one bar, matching the one and a half hour playback touted on the Personal Projector website.

Roundup

If you are looking for one of these devices, you obviously know that you will need a dark room to get the most of the Adapt Pico Play projector. Coming in at a very reasonable £99 at Personal Projector, the device launches on November 29 but is available to pre-order now. Showing it to friends and family, they saw many more uses for the Pico Play than the typical movie playback. Most saw the advantage of being able to display media wherever they were instead of having to hunt down a television set or a laptop to show off photos taken at events or shots of loved ones.

At this price range, it’s a bit more than a stocking stuffer, but it’s still a very cool idea. With the holidays coming up, it might be a great buy for your family get-together.