Samsung kicked off 2012’s Mobile World Congress with a big surprise, treating us to a new member of its Galaxy smartphone family. The Galaxy Beam was something of a surprise – a smartphone that featured an inbuilt projector.
The intriguing device has now been given a price and a release time by UK retailer Unlocked Mobiles. The price for a SIM-free handset is £384.98 including VAT, and we should be able to get our hands on the device early June time. That’s not a bad price if you ask us, but we’d like to see an update to Android 4.0 in the future please Samsung!
About the Galaxy Beam
Why the name ‘Beam’? This phone isn’t your average smartphone; in fact it hides a Pico Projector in its 12.5mm thick body, allowing you to ‘Beam’ pictures, movies and more onto a large wall or flat surface.
Samsung has been working on this product for a while, and actually demonstrated a very early (and different looking) prototype in 2010. The product is now finished and almost ready to go on sale, and to our surprise it will be coming to the UK in the coming months. Phones with projectors have been done before, but they always end up finding a home in a far eastern country, leaving Europeans wondering when they might get a projector phone.
The Galaxy Beam hides its Pico Projector in the top of the phone, allowing you to easily point it at a wall and project images and video to a 50-inch size. Admit it, you’re impressed.
The projector itself pumps out a resolution of 640 x 360 with a Lumen brightness rating of 15. By managing to trim the shell down to just 12.5mm thick, Samsung has the right to claim for the ‘world’s thinnest projector phone’ title, which we don’t think anyone will be arguing with for a while.
Asides from the exciting inclusion of a projector, the Beam’s other specifications are very run-of-the-mill. It features a Dual-Core 1GHz processor, 8GB of internal memory, 4-inch WVGA touchscreen and it runs on Android 2.3, aka Gingerbread.
Samsung says it will be releasing unique docking stations for the product to make it easy to project onto walls and other such surfaces. It’d be nice if these docks also kept the battery juiced and offered audio out capabilities so that speakers could be hooked up to create a mobile theatre system, but we’ll have to wait and see.
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