Check out the photo below. This looks to be the smallest projector we have seen to date - dare we call it a fingertip projector?

Steve Sechrist
Senior Analyst and Editor
Projection Monthly

This little baby throws an 8 ½ x 11-inch sized image… umm, where again? The short answer - anywhere you can, because you can. Point it up at the ceiling, shoot it against the back of your seat on the airport bus, or plane. Have one of your friends in the group turn around and use his/her back as the projection screen.

OK all the bugs aren’t worked out, but cell phone integration has hit a new technology density peak with this new prototype projector. Texas Instruments showed the device at this week’s CTIA wireless convention in Orlando.

Beyond system-on-chip silicon, multi-band wireless radio transmitters and receivers, superfast audio and video codec’s, multi Gigabyte flash memory, and LED backlit VGA-resolution displays or razor thin OLED’s, we now add to the cell phone technology mix a 2.2M (million) microscopic mirror digital light engine, powered by not one, but three (RGB) lasers, packed into a 1.5-inch projector. Just hitch it on the bottom of the cell phone-connect up a few wires and voila-more technology than we took to the moon (probably x 4).

At first blush, detractors may say, no one would use this or be willing to pay for it. But all this "stuff" compressed in the palm of your hand is device evolution at its finest.

Think of just how far the cell phone has come. From its overweight beginnings of a gold-bar sized (and almost as expensive) radio phone offering basic mobile voice communications, the cell phone is evolving yet again-this time into a personal information sharing device with a "cool" factor that could just catch on.

Products may not evolve as planners first envision, but new technologies open up possibilities and applications beyond our first ideas. Yes, TI did this because they can-but isn’t that why we went to the moon? That was a monumental human achievement of that century, but it also came with residual benefits (miniaturization and the boost to solid-state electronics for one). TI and the partner development teams at Mitsubishi, Toshiba, Samsung, LG and others are to be lauded for this breakthrough and the willingness to deliver new innovations to the market.