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If you’re one of the millions* of people who’ve thought, “I love my phone but what it really needs is the ability to project video clips onto walls,” then it is literally your lucky day. That’s right! Samsung’s bonkers barmy Galaxy Beam projector phone is out in the UK today.
Luke got his hands on the Beam at Mobile World Congress in February, where along with the Nokia PureView, it was one of the stars of the show — if only because a proper gimmick makes a change from yet another 4-inch Android phone. You can see his video preview below.
That’s not to say the Beam doesn’t have anything else going for it, but it’s a pretty mediocre Android 2.3 Gingerbread phone otherwise. Its 4-inch screen has a nothing-to-write-home-about 480×800-pixel resolution. Innards-wise, it’s packing a 1GHz dual-core processor, 8GB of storage and a microSD slot that lets you add up to 32GB more.
It does have a beefy 2,000mAh battery to keep the light show running for up to 3 hours, according to Samsung. Its projected picture can be up to 50 inches across from a few feet away. Luke saw it at a darkened booth in Barcelona and thought it was bright and colourful, but it isn’t high definition.
It’s a real shame that the hardware is so humdrum, because the Beam isn’t cheap enough to just have as a backup to play around with. It’s going for about £400 online, and you can get it free on contracts from £26 per month.
Perhaps the price will fall in the coming months, but I just can’t see who’d buy this. Samsung had huge success with the enormous Galaxy Note — I didn’t think anyone would want a phone that big, but millions did — and it was largely due to it being a top-notch phone, as well as having a stupendously vast screen.
If it had done the same with the Beam, and crammed the projector into a quad-core Ice Cream Sandwich phone, it could have had another sleeper hit. Better yet, it could have been upgraded to Jelly Beam.
As it is, it’s likely to just be a quirky footnote, a Spellbound to the Galaxy S3‘s Rear Window. Would you splash out on a gimmicky phone like this? Do you think you’d get enough use out of the projector? Or is it too much to sacrifice? Paint pictures with light down in the comments, or on our widescreen Facebook page.
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Watch this:
Samsung Galaxy Beam hands-on
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*Millions may be an exaggeration.
