Samsung Galaxy Beam shines brightly (pictures)

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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.

A 0.5-inch-thick profile isn't bad for a handset that also packs in a projector.

I love the sporty goldenrod color behind the back cover, which matches the phone's sides.