15 May 2008

Samsung expects to unveils
projector equipped phone this year!

Roughly the size of a wireless earpiece and less than half an inch thick, the 3M mobile projection engine delivers brilliant VGA resolution images and is available today.

Small, two-three inch displays that are common to mobile devices such as cell phones are barriers to growth of exciting mobility markets, because they limit the user viewing experience.

Projection display solution is expected to eliminate this bottleneck, benefiting consumers, mobile operators, content providers, and consumer electronics OEMs.

For years we've been promised micro-projectors the size of a remote control, a matchbox and even a sugar cube that will liberate visual content from the tiny screens of our mobile devices but unfortunately but unfortunately none have materialized onto the market. Now, after the bunch of the projectors related articles over the past few years I finally have some really good and very promising news.

As you may have laready know, 3M recently announced ultra-compact, LED-illuminated projection engine designed for integration into virtually any personal electronic device and now it is confirmed that Samsung will be the first manufacturer to use 3M's mini-projector, a component that the Maplewood-based manufacturer hopes will revolutionize the use of personal digital devices.

On display at the company's annual meeting in St. Paul today, the mini-projector can take an image from a cell phone, laptop computer or any electronic device, and project it on a large scale onto a wall or floor. The component itself is about the size of a matchbox.

"We're going to roll this out to commercialize and expand" the market for such products, said CEO George Buckley, told shareholders at the RiverCentre convention hall.

The mini projector is expected to hit the market later this year, though it's unclear whether that will be as a stand-alone handheld device, or within a Samsung product. The mini-projector is expected to cost in the $200 to $400 range.

Looking at present business conditions, Buckley said the U.S. economy "is not what we'd like it to be." He hinted at some new strategies to drive growth in the U.S. in the near term but didn't give details.

In the first quarter, 3M's comparable sales in the U.S. were down 2.8 percent, he said. The company's continuing growth in overseas markets continues to buoy overall sales, he said. International markets accounted for 63 percent of all 3M sales last year, and that figure will be at the 70 percent mark "in a few short years," he said.