CES 2010
Samsung and Texas Instruments (TI) are showing off a new prototype Samsung projector phone at CES. It uses a very tiny DLP projector module from TI that allows the phone to be smaller than previous projector phones. These tiny projector modules use a bright LED as a light source. There's still a size penalty, but the overall phone is noticeably smaller than the LG eXpo with its projector module attached.
This particular Samsung model doesn't have a name or model number yet, nor has a release date or country been announced. Therefore it's not guaranteed it will actually come to market. However it is "production-ready", and did indeed look and work more like a finished product than a prototype. It had "Anycall" printed on the front, which means that if it does come to market, it will probably be for Korea first.
Like all current projector phones and "pico-projectors", you have a choice: the image can be very small, or very dim. You can project an 8x10 image from a foot or two away in average indoor lighting, but in order to project anything much larger - like the 60 inches Samsung advertises - you need to be in a relatively dark room.
When simply navigating the menus, the phone can project the same thing you see on the screen. However, going into the special "projector" menu, you can choose a few more useful modes.
Two of those modes, of course, are for playing video and running presentations. When in video mode, the phone's display shows playback controls, while the video content is projected.
Another interesting option is a "presenter" mode that uses the camera to project a live video image of what's below the phone. It's like a pocket-size version of the overhead projector your teacher might have used in grade school.
There are also a number of decidedly less useful - but very cute - projector modes. One is a kind of shadow puppet theater. It shows you how to make various shadow puppets on the screen, while projecting other shadow puppet characters to interact with.
It's not clear when Samsung will bring something like this to the US to compete with the LG eXpo, but it is clear that this technology is maturing and becoming more practical... relatively speaking, of course.
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