Mobile Phones: Is this a projector or a phone?

Ok, so you have a cool picture or even a movie on your phone display that you want to show to a group of friends. Yes, everybody wants to see it at once, and it has to be passed round and you have to peer over somebody else's shoulder to see it and you cant quite see it so it has to be started again. Such is one of the frustrations of mobile phone use, though not for much longer.

A new kind of phone is about to come on the scene that has a built in powerful projector. Soon when you want to show that picture or movie you will just be able to point your phone at a wall and the images will be projected just like in the cinema.

This has been made possible by a remarkable development created by Texas Instruments in the USA. The company has managed to make a video projector as small as a pea that will easily fit into mobile phones. This projector is an example of how remarkable miniaturisation has become. Despite its tiny size it contains thousands of tiny mirrors, one for each pixel. Each time a pixel is needed to form part of the image the little mirror is moved so that it reflects light from either a red, green or blue light emitting diode (LED) onto the screen.

The resolution of the first devices is only 480 by 320, that is about half that of a standard laptop but it will produce a picture about 1.3 metres wide. The second generation chip has a much higher resolution of 850 by 480 which is quite reasonable. To do this needs over 400.000 of those tiny mirrors.

Also it does not use too much power. A projection time of two hours is quite possible. This phone would not only be useful for leisure, but it would be a great tool for business, for instance PowerPoint presentations would be really easy and portable, perhaps too much so.

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