Samsung Galaxy Beam Pro Reviews

If the Samsung Galaxy Beam is an indicator of what future smartphones hold for us, then I am willing to buy my ticket to get on that crazy train. No more projectors and cables or fighting for electric plugs at the airport; the hottest commodity will be flat, white surfaces.This phone has not been officially released in the United States; however, if you cast your net into an internet search, you will pull up street prices around $470 for the unlocked Beam with compatible carrier and service with AT&T 2G/3G and T-Mobile 2G. Samsung is headed into a bright future. How long will they stay in that spotlight? Apple, I believe the ball is now in your court.

Samsung is either the Dr. Frankenstein or Girl Talk of tech companies. With the Galaxy Camera, it combined a 21x zoom camera with an Android device, and with the Galaxy Beam, it smashed together a phone with a pico projector. The former is a somewhat compelling mishmash; is the Beam an equally successful pairing of two devices? We went hands-on to find out.

There's definitely some excitement to be had when reviewing a device so out of the ordinary, but we found it a little difficult to make a final judgment call. The Galaxy Beam does well at what it claims to be good at (projecting media), but it's otherwise mediocre at best. That's not to say it's a horrible phone, but the low-to-mid-range feature set makes it a tough sell at $430, especially when you can pay the same price for much nicer devices these days. In this situation, it means that you either have to love the projector enough to justify the higher price, or the feature is so important to your business that you're willing to sacrifice a lot of modern functionality to get it.

While the projector part of the handset works rather well, the Beam is much more expensive than the otherwise technically similar Galaxy S Advance. It also has an LCD rather than AMOLED screen and is still lumbered with Gingerbread. Granted, if you want to turn your iPhone into a projector you need to cough up around £150 for a decent adaptor like Aiptek’s MobileCinema i15 but at least you can remove it when not in use.

Samsung is a famous manufacturer of Smartphones. The Korean manufacturer offers models ranging from high-end devices to cheap, entry-level phones. A wide number of operating systems are used to run these phones. The majority of the Samsung Smartphones run on Google Android. The cheaper section has phones which run on Samsung's own bada OS. On top of this, there are also devices which use the Windows Phone OS. Of course, the Korean manufacturer has also covered special areas. For example, the Galaxy Xcover is an outdoors model and is quite new. In this review, we will test another niche model, the Samsung Galaxy beam. This test model is a middle-class Smartphone and is equipped with a LED projector - a rarity. However, Samsung has already launched a phone with a beamer in 2010. Samsung promises a projection area of up to 50 inches (around 127 cms), which measures up to large flat screen TVs. We are excited to see what this mini projector is capable of. The rest of the specifications are not awe-inspiring: 4 inch display, Android 2.3, 1 GHz dual-core CPU and 8 GB internal memory. All this for 539 Euros (recommended price) - fair.

The Samsung GALAXY Beam is certainly a specialty device. If you have a need for a projector that’s also a smartphone, or a smartphone that’s also a projector – this is your only real legitimate choice. This smartphone is powerful enough to be your normal everyday driver, but you’re certainly going to want to know that you’ll be using the projector on a daily basis to make it all worth your while.

Samsung is targeting a niche market with the release of the Beam, and as such faces no real competition. That being said, should you buy the Galaxy Beam for its projection capabilities? Given that purchasing a separate projector will be even more expensive than getting the Beam we'd probably say yes. But if you can, you might want to hold off a bit. Odds are the price will fall to more reasonable levels once the Galaxy Beam has been on the market for a few months and you might be able to get a much sweeter deal.

All-in-all, we're a little pushed to find more than a couple of random things you might need a projector for. You could go old-school and make people sit through a literal slide show of your holiday snaps. Or you could possibly be out in the middle of nowhere with nothing but a sheep to project a film onto the side of. Or, of course, maybe you really do want to use it in-situ at a meeting. But other than that, what are you going to do with it? It needs a quiet, incredibly dark place to make the viewing possible…so, props to Samsung for running with this, but we don't see the hordes needing a middling smartphone with projector addendum just yet.

Despite weak software, the Samsung Galaxy Beam's bright projector pushes boundaries, and strong smartphone features make it a worthy standalone device.

It is fascinating how Samsung's researchers managed to stuff all these LEDs inside the small projecting unit in the Galaxy Beam, and still achieve a watchable picture that can be blown up to 50”, as if you carry your own big-screen TV in your pocket. Naturally, the resolution and brightness can't replace a TV experience, but under the right circumstances you can definitely enjoy a movie or two on the go together with many other people sitting nearby. That's the Galaxy Beam's key feature. To top it all off, the phone is a very good all-around Android performer with a fairly compact and appealing design, considering what’s inside. Moreover, the large battery comes in handy to deliver excellent endurance in your daily smartphone routine as well, and there is one extra battery in the box. The only big drawback is that the phone doesn’t come with the newest Android onboard. As for the price, it costs about the same as a high-end Android handset. Considering that a separate pico projector case for your smartphone with the same nHD definition and 15 lumen specifications costs around $200, the phone actually seems priced reasonably.

The Samsung Galaxy Beam is definitely one of the more interesting releases of 2012 so far. It's essentially an average, mid-range Android phone that boasts a built-in HD projector as its key feature.