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EDN Europe's Editor Graham Prophet posts a selection of comments and insights prompted by the many items of industry news and rumour that cross the editorial desk or are gathered on his frequent travels to interviews, press conferences and events around Europe - and further afield - and somehow never find their way to the magazine or the web site, recovering some of the information otherwise lost in the noise level...

Saturday, February 16, 2008

Next; the image-projecting cellphone

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Coming soon to a mobile phone near you; the pocket projector. At Mobile World Congress, TI was demonstrating a DLP-technology projector housed in a handset outline. The company hopes to get the product on the market this year as a module. How good is it? Hard to judge in the environment of an exhibition hall. At the back of a stand, away from the main lighting but still fairly brightly lit, and held about 40cm from a surface it projected a reasonably bright – watchable if hardly dazzling – image about 25cm across. The demonstrator is Q-VGA so you probably would not want to expand it any further: production versions will have more resolution, but a spokesman would not say how much more.
Results with DLP are, of course all about the light source: how long does TI think battery life will be? “We think consumers will want about an hour, and we can do that,” says the man from TI.
I often wonder, how do they do know that? How do you test market something like that? “Here’s a product concept you’ve never seen before. We don’t know, and you don’t know how you will eventually use it (if you ever do). Now, how long should the batteries last?”
So, you’ll be able to get a mobile phone that, in a room with the lights turned down, will project an acceptable picture up to the size of – my guess – say, about a small PC monitor. No doubt it’s really clever, but will it catch on? As part of a phone, or as a product in its own right?

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