14 DAY TRIAL // Texas Instruments (TI) has presented at the CTIA Wireless 2077 show its digital light processing (DLP) "pico" projector. The device is integrated in a mobile phone and seems to work great, better than people might expect from a device squeezed in a small handset.
The product will not be brought out on the market soon, as it is still in the prototype stage. The producer used a fake mobile phone case in order to present only the projector's capabilities, not laying so much stress on the actual handset. After all, whoever chooses to buy such a device will do it because he/she needs a compact and highly capable solution for projecting presentations without the large, old fashioned devices.
The phone should be capable to shine a 15-inch-wide image even in a room with bright light, where the quality should considerably have to suffer. That's an acceptable quality and a useful solution for situations when the user might have to make small presentations without having a classic large device for this.
TI has been presenting its concept for some time now, even offering some demonstrations from time to time. Still, it looks like they still have some road ahead until the mobile phone projector hits the market. They have managed to make the projector work, but there is a great amount of work to be done on the handset. The fake mobile phone that houses the projector is pretty large and looks bulky enough to fit in any pocket.
It is supposed to be at real scale, although it shouldn't come as a surprise if the real thing proves to be even larger than the model when it eventually releases. This is the main drawback that TI has to overcome, as the self standing projector concept is a pretty useful one.
