Projector in Phone!!

How fast does the technology change? Well, super fast I would say!! From the plain old big "compass Box" phone with a small screen, enabling calling and text messaging, to today’s large screen, full touch, smart phones which give the power to carry out multiple tasks on you phone, it took what, about 15 years? Roughly. But now that it has picked up pace, the development doesn’t look back. Nor is it constrained to big names. We had a huge market captured by Chinese companies offering dual and even triple sim phones, which developed in to an industry segment with many underdogs rising to fame. Companies like intex, micromax, fly, Videocon, maxx are not frown at, when their mobiles are talked about.

But a projector in a phone? and that to at the price at which it is announced!! Many of the enthusiasts and tech freaks may be rubbing their palms together by now to get their hands at this innovation.

Samsung had come out with a projector phone some time back, but the price was too steep to even thing about. But now intex, a little known company in the mobile arena, has come out with a dual sim next generation phone, V-Show IN8810 in India(you see Samsung and Nokia? there are companies which care for India, and then you all are forced to follow suite) with a built in LED projector. Though its not clear whether it’s an android based or java based phone, the website seems to indicate that it is a java based phone, which might be bit of a negative factor. The company advertises a 36" projection area for the projector, which is quite good(I don’t expect the quality to be as good as a standalone projector, but you never know). You can run videos on the phone and then view them on the screen or project them on to a wall. Also the phone features a front and back  camera with video recording, 3.2" touchscreen(not clear whether resistive or capacitive, but I guess the former), 2 GSM sim slots, 64 MB internal memory and a memory slot for up to 16 GB external memory. Emails can be configured on this phone.

With the LED lamp life of 20,000 hours, we can expect this phone to keep on projecting continuously for more than 2 years(but you need to have something to project for that long). Anyway, the lamp life is impressive. And best of all is the price, which is 12,000 rs. or about 265$.

Negatives : I would have expected intex to charge a little more and give me android and a capacitive touch screen. They have not announced what formats of video will it play. Unless they have the most widely used formats like mp4 and avi, they cannot expect their sales to be up. A radio and bluetooth(not announced) will be missed a lot if not included(I am considering that the audio player is available, else V-Show, bye bye from India). It is not specified whether the phone has a standard 3.5 mm audio output, so as to be able to connect it to large speakers. It is not clear whether there is any provision to give video input to the phone, but I wouldn’t expect it for the price. And most important of all is the battery life. The battery has to run for the 3 hours that they have boasted as the projection time on battery. Else it’s useless in the Indian markets where the films running up to 3 hours.

So gear up for the December launch of this phone, the V-Show IN8810. It might be useful during the well known Indian power cuts, when you get the sudden urge to watch a Hindi flick!!