Introduction
You don't see many of those around. Perhaps you're looking in the wrong place. As always, we're glad to be of service but, no, the Samsung i7410 didn’t ring any bells. It was the good old Phone Finder again.
Anyway, this is how it started - if you'll excuse our hazy knowledge of the Asian market. The first projector phone was a dumbphone, but the whole thing wasn't such a dumb idea after all.
There was obviously potential waiting to be unleashed and no one could've done that better than Android. Now, wind back to 2010 and the first projector smartphone. And by the way, the Samsung I8520 Galaxy Beam was not just another smartphone - 3.7" AMOLED was quite the business back then. Not to mention the 8MP stills and 720P video.
But enough history. Here's what the new Galaxy Beam is all about.
Samsung I8530 Galaxy Beam at a glance:
- Built-in 15-lumen nHD projector
- General: GSM 850/900/1800/1900 MHz, 3G with HSPDA 14.4 Mbps, HSUPA 5.76 Mbps
- Form factor: Touchscreen bar phone
- Dimensions: 124 x 64.2 x 12.5 mm, 145.3g
- Display: 4.0" 16M-color TFT capacitive touchscreen, 480 x 800 pixels
- CPU: Dual-core 1GHz ARM Cortex-A9 processor, Mali-400 GPU
- Memory: 768 MB RAM, 8GB storage, microSD card slot
- OS: Android OS, v2.3.6 Gingerbread with TouchWiz 4.0
- Camera: 5 megapixel auto-focus camera with LED flash; face detection, geo-tagging; 1.3MP front-facing camera
- Video recording: 720p video recording
- Connectivity: Wi-Fi b/g/n, Bluetooth 3.0 with A2DP, standard microUSB port, GPS receiver with A-GPS, 3.5mm audio jack
- Battery: 2,000 mAh
- Misc: Accelerometer, proximity sensor, Swype text input, Polaris Office document viewer/editor
Now, we don’t need to tell you the original Galaxy Beam didn’t quite catch on. OK, a projector phone is not something you can expect to make huge money off. But it's not an idea either that you just throw in the bin.
So, Samsung's decision to stick with their plan gives us the I8530 Galaxy Beam. Given the original projector phone barely made an appearance outside the MWC venue, this is not what you'd call a grand return.
The Samsung Galaxy Beam at HQ
It's a measured and cautious second try and we don't think Samsung can be blamed for playing it too safe. The truth is the new Galaxy Beam is actually a step down from what the original offered two years ago. AMOLED has been swapped for LCD, the inbuilt storage cut in half, the 8MP camera relegated to 5MP and the WVGA pico projector reduced to nHD.
Of course, the bump in processing power is welcome. The new Beam has a dual-core engine and double the RAM. The projector makes up for the lost resolution with increased brightness - 15 lumens, up from the original 10.
Ultimately, it wasn't Samsung's goal to upgrade the original. They wanted something doable instead, a sensible projector/smartphone combo and, not least, more affordable. It will take a full review to see if the I8530 Galaxy Beam is up to it. But this quick preview of an early pre-production unit should give us a good idea of what to expect.
Samsung I8530 Galaxy Beam 360-degree spin
The I8530 Samsung Galaxy Beam is genuinely trying to improve on the ergonomics its predecessor. Not that you should expect a phone with a built-in projector to be ultra compact. At 124 x 64.2 x 12.5 the new Beam is a slightly taller device but a good 2.4 mm slimmer and it's also more than 10g lighter.
The I8530 Galaxy Beam has a bigger screen than the original but while the resolution stays the same it's a garden variety LCD and not a Super AMOLED.
Design and build quality
Place the Galaxy Beam down on a table and you'll hardly be able to tell it apart from a Samsung Galaxy R or an S Advance. The actual difference is in screen size and technology. The Beam comes with a regular 4" LCD screen. The S Advance has a 4" Super AMOLED, while the Galaxy R is equipped with a 4.2" SuperClear LCD.
The WVGA (480 x 800) resolution works out to a pixel density of around 233 ppi. It's a decent display but nothing to write home about. Colors are slightly dull and the screen could've been brighter overall. It still does better in terms of sunlight legibility than we expected and its viewing angles are quite respectable too.
The Galaxy Beam front
There's a secondary camera above the display, as well as proximity and ambient light sensors. Moving below the display you'll find the usual Home button flanked by two capacitive controls: Menu and Back.
Above and below the display
The projector lens is placed at the top, deeply inset under a big piece of protective glass. It stays out of the way most of the time and only slightly protrudes at the back.
The top of the Galaxy Beam
More than once during our test, it felt the lens would've made sense on one of the sides of the smartphone, given the projector's default orientation is landscape but more on that later.
The projector lens
The projector can be used a flashlight as well, and it's quite suited to that job too, if you don't mind the relatively small lit surface.Its placement certainly feels more natural than a LED on the back.
The projector doubles as a flashlight
On the right side of the handset, closest to the top, is the dedicated projector key. A little further down is the usual power/lock button. We did mix those two up at first, hitting the projector button instead of the unlock button. However, it doesn't take too long to get used to the arrangement. The last thing to note on the right is a hot-swappable microSD card slot hidden under a small lid.
On the right of the phone
The volume rocker is on the left side, where we were surprised to find an external SIM slot as well. It's quite out of the ordinary for the SIM compartment to be placed on the outside but the phone's inner body is almost entirely sealed. It's actually bolted to the front, making the smartphone more dust-resistant than usual.
The left side of the Galaxy Beam
The bottom of the Galaxy Beam features the mouthpiece and a microUSB port for charging and data connections.
The bottom
The back panel of the Galaxy Beam is entirely made of plastic but benefits from a nice anti-slip rubbery finish. There's a slight bulge at the top to accommodate the projector. The 5 MP camera lens is centrally placed right below that buldge, with a single LED flash at its side.
In the bottom left corner is the loudspeaker grille.
The rubberized back panel and under the hood
Removing the back panel reveals the 2,000 mAh Li-Ion battery. We didn't have time to do a detailed test, which wouldn't have been too revealing anyway - our test unit is still in the early stages of its development. It's worth noting though, that Samsung promise around 3 hours of projection time. We'll make sure to test that out when we hopefully get a retail unit, but you'll probably be able to count on above average power backup , whether or not the phone is used as an actual projector.
The Samsung Galaxy Beam in hand
The Samsung Galaxy Beam is not the slimmest phone out there, not by a long shot, but it's extremely well put together and reasonably ergonomic. It's comfortable and secure to hold, and fairly easy to operate with one hand. It seems though that a stable stand will be most welcome in projector mode, if the presentation requires using the screen.
The actual projector performance is coming up right after the break.
Projector
With the dedicated key, you can turn the projector on from anywhere in the interface: the gallery, the document viewer, in the browser or any other scenario you can think of. The Galaxy Beam will instantly project the contents of the display at a resolution close to nHD (640 x 360). We say close to, since the aspect of the nHD resolution is 16:9, whereas the display is 15:9, so a few pixels are left unused.
Here's a demo video of the projector in action that we prepared for you.
The resolution is enough for videos and even presentations (as long as the font size isn’t too small). Samsung claim that at a 2 meter distance, the image is as big as a 50″ TV. The projector isn’t very bright, so to get good results at that distance you’ll need a very dark room. In brighter lighting, you’ll need to stand closer to your screen to be able to see anything.
The dedicated Projector app has a number of nice tricks that will enhance your presentation. In Quick Pad mode you can use a pointer or a pen to highlight specific bits. You can set the color and thickness of the underline. There's an eraser as well. Once activated, the Quick Pad integrates with the Notification area, so you can enable and disable the various options as you please. For example, you have activated the virtual pointer on one of the slides, but you need to turn it off to swipe to the next, where the highlighter will be used.
The projector app
The projector's default orientation is landscape and any content projected in portrait mode is essentially a crop. That's a waste of resolution and nHD isn't exactly plenty of pixels to work with. At this point, the dedicated projector key is in charge of rotating the screen, but we were told that it will be controlled by means of software in the final version.
There's manual projector brightness setting as well as an option to disable the phone's screen when the projector is on. That's good to have when watching video.
The volume keys are used for focusing at this point, but that apparently is another temporary solution to be replaced by software controls later on. Of course, we can only wish for the manual focus jog-dials in the previous two projector phones by Samsung.
The volume keys also control the brightness of the torch - the dedicated Projector app has a flashlight mode too. Another option is Ambience mode - you can use it to create a heavily customized visual alarm or mood light. Essentially, you can have the phone project an image with info such as time and date at a preset time with its own repeat pattern, snooze time, fade time and a tone to go with it. The Visual Presenter mode, on the other hand, uses the camera to project whatever is in the viewfinder.
The thing needs a lot of finishing touches before it's ready to launch but it looks like Samsung are trying to integrate as many options as possible. It will be interesting to see how they work out in a final retail-ready version of the Galaxy Beam.
A white wall works well enough for a projection surface if you don’t have a special projection screen. This means all you need is a Galaxy Beam in your pocket and you can share your photos with a large group of people (it’s way more comfortable than everyone huddled over a small mobile phone screen), watch a movie or do a presentation in any office you walk into.
The 2,000 mAh battery is rated at 3 hours of projection time, which should be good enough for either of those activities.
User interface and performance
The Beam is powered by the all too familiar combo of Gingerbread 2.3.6 and TouchWiz 4.0.
You can have up to 7 homescreen panes to fill with widgets and shortcuts. A pinch on any homescreen zooms out to an aggregate view of all homescreen panes, which can be rearranged, deleted or added.
Widgets, shortcuts or folders are pulled onto the homescreen from a taskbar at the bottom of the screen.
General interface
The lockscreen of the Galaxy Beam has the usual integration of missed events with shortcuts to the relevant apps.
The only new thing about the notification area is the integration of the projector's Quick Pad feature. As usual, TouchWiz provides the handy quick toggles for Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, GPS, Silent mode and auto-rotation.
Lockscreen • Notification area
The app launcher is very similar to the homescreen - you can create folders to go with your shortcuts and you can add, remove and rearrange pages just like you would homescreens. If you prefer, you can choose List view instead of the default Grid view.
The main menu
The dual-core 1 GHz processor handles the UI perfectly and you'll go about your business glitch-free most of the time.
Performance
The Samsung I8530 Galaxy Beam runs on two Cortex-A9 cores, clocked at 1 GHz, and has 768 MB of RAM at its disposal. The Mali 400 GPU is the final bit of the ST-Ericsson NovaThor chipset, which we came to know from the Samsung Galaxy S Advance.
AnTuTu • BenchmarkPi
The Beam is a reasonably powered smartphone that will hold its own even against superior competition. In day-to-day use you will hardly feel that big of a difference between it and a Galaxy S II.
Camera and video recording
The Samsung Galaxy Beam sports a 5 MP autofocus camera, capable of taking photos at maximum resolution of 2592 x 1944 pixels. There's a single LED flash, as well as a front-facing 1.3 MP camera.
The camera interface looks pretty familiar with two shortcut bars on each side of the viewfinder. On the right you get the still camera / camcorder switch, a virtual shutter key and the gallery shortcut (which is a thumbnail of the last photo taken).
Camera UI
The Beam produces nice-looking stills with good amount of detail, nicely-tuned colors and low noise. Here are the samples below.
Samsung Galaxy Beam camera samples
The short shot-to-shot time came as another pleasant surprise to us.
The Samsung Galaxy Beam shoots 720p videos at 30 fps. The video camera interface is identical to the still camera, using the same customizable taskbar on the left with four shortcuts. You can use the front camera to record video too, but at a lower resolution.
Camcorder UI
Here's a 720p video sample, captured with the Samsung Galaxy Beam.
Also, here's an untouched 720p@30fps sample (16.5MB) straight from the phone.
Conclusion
If nothing else, this is a phone with above average battery backup and an extra powerful flashlight. Now, that's if you're less than impressed with the projector capabilities. To be honest though, being able to share videos and images is not a bad feature to have - and we mean share them instantly. You can watch movies with friends or play slideshows of your photos with any midrange smartphone with an HDMI port but what about the times when and places where there isn't a TV set around?
On top of that, the Galaxy Beam is, or rather, has the potential to be a reasonably capable presentation tool. When Samsung hopefully have the software ironed out, the Beam will be ready to deliver presentations. All you will need is a good enough stand to fix it to make sure swipes and onscreen gestures don't give the audience a headache.
On the other hand, you don't need any extra equipment to enjoy a movie or a slideshow on your living room wall - nothing more than good enough blinds.
Projector-phones are a long way from becoming mainstream, but the concept is not entirely without a future. Granted, the original Samsung I8520 Galaxy Beam was a fiasco but Samsung are taking a different approach this time around. The successor is a downgrade and that seems to make sense. A niche device hardly needs all the latest technology anyway.
At least the projector got an upgrade. It has a 15 lumen bulb, instead of the 10 lumen unit of its predecessor and that might be worth more than an AMOLED screen or a slimmer waistline to potential owners.
What the Beam needs at this point is some finishing touches to the projector software. Even now though, it does a reasonably good job of showing movies and slideshows.
What we came to realize doing this preview was that the Samsung I8530 Galaxy Beam is more of a smartphone for the young than an essential corporate tool. Its projector simply seemed better suited for casual multimedia sharing than pro tasks. That's why we believe pricing is what will ultimately decide the faith of the new Galaxy Beam - if teenagers and twenty-somethings are able to afford it, the smartphone/projector concept might finally gain some traction.
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