You’re probably sick by now of hearing us lament over the lack of niche phones in the market and the seemingly unrelenting pushing forward of processing power without much effort going to enhancing other areas of smartphone performance or even offering something completely new. Fortunately for us big companies like Samsung do occasionally come out with something intriguing and of late it even seems to be becoming more of a trend, with intriguing shinies cropping up with more and more regularity. The latest Samsung piece of interest is the Samsung Galaxy Beam, but first we'd like to point out some of the other cool stuff we've been seeing in the past year or so.
At last year’s MWC we saw the first Galaxy Note phone/tablet hybrid. Noone had any idea how successful a phone/tablet hybrid would be when the Note was released. If anything, the outlook was grim bases solely on the total failure of the Dell Streak just one year prior. Since then the Galaxy Note has seen modest success around the globe as its fair share of rave reviews. As a result we’ve now seen the Optimus VU from LG; another hybrid that has taken the 4:3, instead of 16:9, aspect-ratio approach with its display. The VU itself is also pegged to be a big earner for LG, built partially on the success of the Galaxy Note.
The Nokia 808 PureView made an impression with its 41MP camera-centric focus this year and while we find the idea of a 41MP censor a little dubious right now we still love the idea of a phone that is a camera-phone first and a smartphone second. Not everyone wants a slightly better version of the same user experience. There are a lot of folks out there who don't need the best smartphone on the market, but not having to lug around a phone and a camera might just appeal to them immensely.
We've also seen a wonderful shift in focus by HTC towards camera technology with its ImageSense chipset. The new camera tech is expected to boost photo quality on newer HTC devices significantly, especially in the motion-capture and low-light departments. Of course HTC is still moving ahead with its quad-core beasties as well, but that's no problem as long as the rest of its technology is progressing at a similar rate.
The Samsung Galaxy Beam is yet another device with a weird and wonderful premise. We’ve mentioned previously our excitement over portable lazer projectors and how we could someday see a viable version integrated right in to a smartphone. Of course projector phones have been around for a while but, to be blunt, they’ve all been pretty sub par. Functionality is usually sacrificed, size is a problem, battery power is terrible, it’s rare to find one running a decent OS and they tend to look pretty sub-par on the aesthetic front.
The Galaxy Beam, however, is pretty standard-looking. It comes running Android 2.3 Gingerbread, has a dual-core 1GHz processor, 768MB of RAM and a 4 inch screen. Its physical design is also very much in line with its contemporaries, with the addition of a coloured rim around the sides of the device.
The projector itself is impressive enough. It doesn’t quite seem to the point where everyone will be stepping over each other to get at one, but it still offers up a decent 12 inch 640 x 360 display. It’s reassuring to see Samsung going ahead with its Beam series, the last of which was unveiled in 2010. While it’s definitely not everyone’s cup of tea just yet, the more Samsung and other manufacturers developed micro pojector technology the faster we’ll arrive at a point where it may simply be considered a common extra for a smartphone to have.
We have to admit that even though we’re big on the idea of pointing our phone at a wall and being instantly granted with a screen as large or larger than our TV, the technology isn’t quite to a point where it can be 100% successfully integrated in to a phone just yet. As always with tech, however, it shouldn’t be more than a few years until we start seeing this kind of stuff with increasing regularity, quality and competitive pricing. But with the way the market seems to be going by then we’ll probably be excited about something else entirely.
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