A palm-sized projector for your mobile device? How passé. We just went hand-ons with a prototype 8-inch Android tablet that has a projector built right in, so you can enjoy movies and apps on your wall.
Made for those who live in tight spaces and can't afford a television, the as-yet-unnamed device from DES International embeds existing pico projector technology in an 8-inch slate. Here at Computex 2014 show in Taipei, we were impressed by the vivid colors we saw in a video of Korean girl band Girls Generation dancing on the wall, despite the somewhat bright light in the area. This is thanks to the high 501 lumen rating (overall brightness the projector can produce).
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Reps for the device pulled the tablet back from the wall to show how bright the picture remained despite being enlarged, and used a wheel on the front of the slate to focus the image so details remained crisp.
The tablet itself is sleek, although it needed a little more room on the front to accommodate the projector module. To power the projector as well as the tablet, a 6,400-mAh battery is packed in, which makers can last through the projection of a full movie (or about 2 hours).
The tablet's own 1024 x 768-pixel touch display is low resolution, but Android games such as "Candy Crush" looked brilliant -- both on the tablet and the wall. The resolution of the projection is 854 x 684 pixels. We imagine families could enjoy playing "Wheel of Fortune" or shopping together on apps such as Amazon.
There's no word yet on when this tablet will be available in the U.S. and for how much, but DES reps estimate it will cost slightly more than most 8-inch tablets on the market right now.
