50 inch mobile screens coming soon

Former MIR writer, Rob Ashwell, is getting very excited about the next big thing in mobile: Pico projectors. Over to Rob…

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There are countless things that frustrate me about mobile phones. Top of the list is the inability to easily (if at all) transfer the dictionary that I’ve built over the past year to a new phone – I don’t want to have to spend another few months teaching the phone that it’s not “mother ducker” or getting frustrated when typing ham and having IBM come up. Or fancy a riot, rather than pint.

But, running a close second is phone adverts that say “high res screen” and huge screen. Orange is current advertising a Samsung with a shot from the G I Joe film, placing a handful of one inch toys around it to make it look like a cinema.

It has to fit in a pocket.

It is therefore a tiny screen.

It is therefore a screen resolution which can only be described (politely) as bobbins. No ifs, buts, maybes or caveats, please. A five inch screen does not equal a cinema.

But, and putting the rant aside…

The analyst iSuppli has been talking to a range of Asian publications and thinks this could be changing with the incorporation of tiny projectors called, ummm, “pico projectors”.

As reported in Nikkei:

“Despite their small sizes, pico projectors produce large displays, with some products capable of showing bright, 50-inch diagonal images on a wall or other surface. This combination of small physical size and large image makes embedded pico projectors a perfect fit for space-constrained mobile devices.”

Of course the big market, at least initially, will be business phones. Which is handy when taking an Apple to a presentation only to realise that MacBooks are poncy and so don’t use the VGA connection used by almost all PCs, and therefore, businesses – not that this has ever happened to me.

Now, does anyone know of a good, downloadable dictionary for a Nokia 6500? And why is there no Oxford English Dictionary plugin in the iPhone apps store yet? And, OED, I do want 10pc of royalties from this when you do it.

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And if you’d like a reminder on just how cool these things are going to be, have a look at the video we published 6 months ago of the Macrovision Mobile Projector: