Samsung
Galaxy Beam (I8530)

The Galaxy Beam (model number: GT-I8530) was the world’s first commercially available projector smartphone. It featured an ultra-bright 15 lumens projector. This allowed users to display and share multimedia content on surfaces such as walls, ceilings, table tops and more. The device had very similar specifications to the Galaxy S Advance, but with the inclusion of the projector. It had a striking design with a textured back cover and a bright yellow plastic body. There was a projector on / off switch on the right-hand side of the device. The phone was able to support projection up to 50-inches wide when the phone positioned six feet away. It had a “projector-dedicated application” that made it easy to select and share content. Samsung was very enthusiastic about the various use cases for the phone be it offering “an instant mini home-theater” or “action-packed interactive gaming” which was delivered via Game Hub, Samsung’s dedicated virtual gaming store that offered over 1,000 games. Samsung also saw opportunities for business users, with the obvious use-case of projecting PowerPoint slides. However, other examples such as an estate agent being able to “beam images of candidate properties to customers as they tour them” or an architect begin able to ”display draft concepts or designs to co-workers on the spot at a building site or public location” were suggested at the time of launch. The company also suggested that students could “collectively share videos or study-work in any dormitory room or student lounge, turning group study into a whole new interactive experience right from a desk table or from the palm of their hands”. The phone was relatively thin at 12.5mm considering it included a built-in projector. It also featured a five-megapixel camera. Despite excitement around the device when it launched, it proved woefully under-powered and did not perform particularly well as a phone. The projection capability worked well in a dark room, but it was more challenging in daylight. Ultimately the Galaxy Beam was an interesting proof of concept and a fun gadget to play with at the time, but history has shown that there was no real market for projector phones and there were few devices in the future that adopted this technology.