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Samsung’s Galaxy Beam — the phone with a projector built-in for no reason other than “hey, why not?” — will cost just short of £400 when it goes on sale this summer.
Unlocked Mobiles has priced it up at £385 including VAT. The handset will go on sale in July — not an ideal time of year to use a projector, with all that pesky daylight about, but there you are. At least it’ll be a good test for Samsung’s 15 lumens projector-in-a-phone.
Luke went hands-on with the Beam out at MWC, so have a read of what he thought here, or watch his preview video below.
The Beam shoots out images at up to 50 inches across, so you can have the equivalent of a very large telly in your pocket wherever you go. It’s HD too. You control the projector through a dedicated app on the 4-inch, 480×800-pixel screen. On the back is a 5-megapixel camera, and it’ll record and playback movies in 720p HD at 30fps.
Software-wise, we’re looking at Android 2.3 Gingerbread as opposed to Ice Cream Sandwich, so you won’t be able to unlock it with facial recognition, or resize your widgets. On board storage is 8GB, but you can add another 32GB via microSD. And a 1GHz dual-core processor powers the phone.
The projector makes the handset a little fatter than most, and has undoubtedly bumped up the price as well. It’s cheaper than the HTC One X, for example, but a lot less powerful.
Though it may seem quite innovative, Samsung actually demoed the Beam back in 2010, when it was just a protoype.
We’re still pounding the halls at Mobile World Congress, so for everything mobile check out mwc.cnet.co.uk. Let me know if you’ll be buying the Galaxy Beam over on our Facebook page, or in the comments below.
