Considering Cheaper Pico-Projectors As Standard Equipment On Cell Phones

An anonymous reader writes "Will pico-projectors become standard equipment on mobile phones, the same way that digital cameras have become? The jury is still out on user acceptance — after all, only four mobile phones use pico-projectors today — but if they get small and cheap enough, mobile phone makers are going to install them. There are four vendors today — Microvision, National Semiconductor, 3M and Texas Instruments — but only TI has design wins in cell phones already on the market. And at the recent Mobile World Congress, TI showed a smaller digital light processor (DLP) chip that fits inside even the slimmest mobile phones, and which it claims is cheap enough to become standard equipment. A lot of us never use the camera in our phones now — would you use a pico-projector if it was built into your phone?"

Comments

Micro, Nano, Pico, Femto

[Anonymous Coward]

Somehow I don't think that a "pico-projector" is one trillionth the size of a regular projector. Asshole marketers.

Phone? No. Laptop? ABSOLUTELY.

[CDS]

No, I wouldn't use one in my phone - but I would ABSOLUTELY use one in my laptop.

It'd be great to be able to project onto a wall for a spur-of-the-moment code discussion, etc. It seems like every time I'm in a meeting & want to share an idea or code snippet, etc. with the group, it happens to be in an area without a projector. If we could have a picoprojector on the backside of my laptop's LCD, you could project from there whenever you need...

Depends on the output

[FrozenGeek]

I don't really care what device I use as a projector. What matters to me is whether the projection is bright enough for my audience to see the projected images clearly. If I can do that from my phone, great (one less piece of equipment to lug around).

The other question I would ask is whether using my phone as a projector would drain the battery, precluding me using the phone as a phone. A phone with a flat battery is not much use.