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Samsung Galaxy Beam shines brightly (pictures)

One of the most interesting Android smartphones to come our way in a long time, the Samsung Galaxy Beam is outfitted with a unique pico projector.

Jessica Dolcourt

July 24, 2012 11:31 p.m. PT

Samsung Galaxy Beam steps into the light

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Samsung Galaxy Beam steps into the light

The Samsung Galaxy Beam is a rugged-looking Android 2.3 Gingerbread smartphone, but with the press of a button it goes from sporty to business-sauve.

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Beam, baby, beam

The contents of your phone look best projected in a darker atmosphere, and the closer you are to the projecting surface, the sharper your image. The Galaxy Beam projects at a 640x360-pixel resolution. Samsung says that the Galaxy Beam's larger 2,000mAh battery will keep movies and other content beaming for about 3 hours straight.

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A matter of perspective

In addition to sharing PowerPoint presentations, you can also play videos, music, and share photos from your gallery, in landscape or portrait modes.

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Now you're just projecting

The darker the room, the lighter the surface, the better your projection results.

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Control it

A built-in app helps you adjust the settings and call up annotating tools like pointers and pen tools for circling and drawing arrows. Unfortunately, giving a presentation didn't go as smoothly as I would have liked.

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Still a phone

Beyond the beaming, there's still a midrange Android smartphone underneath it all, and I don't mean midrange in a negative way.

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Specs

There's Android Gingerbread on the OS front, with Samsung's TouchWiz UI on top. The 4-inch Super AMOLED screen looks bright and beautiful as usual. A 1GHz dual-core processor handles performance like video playback.

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SIM card

The external SIM card slot helps keep the phone relatively slim.

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MicroSD expansion

Up to 32GB of storage on a microSD card complements the Galaxy Beam's 8GB of internal storage.

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Back

Look closely and you can see the bulge of the projector. The 5-megapixel camera and flash sit below. The soft-touch finish is comfortable in the hand.

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