I’ve written before about products from Chinavasion, like the cell phone watch, and once again, they sent me something you don’t see every day. It’s a cell phone that also projects movies like a big projector, but in a small package.

Trying out the projector
I know you want to see the projector first, so I’ll just jump right in. The 640×480 projector can focus with a projected image as small as just a few inches or it can project an image up to about the size of a 42 inch TV. The projection is bright, but still hard to see with the lights on, of course. Turning the projector on (as you can see in the video below) requires just hodling down one of the little buttons on the left or right of the face of the phone. One is for internal projection while the other projects from an external video source. The external video source is handled by a small included cable for RCA in. In my testing, I simply plugged by XBox into this cable and the cable into the phone to hook it up. Then I hit the external source projection button, chose between PAL and NTSC and was projecting video. I live this feature because you can easily hook it up to any device with RCA out cables, like a personal media player, for larger viewing. Imagine you’re at a party and a friend wants to show everyone a funny video but it’s on his small PMP. Just hook it up to your phone and everyone can watch… after they’re done reeling at the fact that your phone has a projector in it.

The alternative to an external video source is internal memory. When you press and hold that projection key, it just displays what the phone’s internal display would otherwise show. That’s good and bad, really. It’s good because you’re not limited to just projecting stored video files. I don’t see much of a reason to project anything else, but at least you have the option. It’s bad because in this mode, the video projects in the same orientation as the phone’s internal display. This means you have to turn the phone on it’s side to view the video upright and the phone’s design is such that it doesn’t sit flat on its side. It comes close, but doesn’t quite do it. The other problem with this is that you have to see the whole video player interface when you play an internal video file. It would be far better if they changed it to swap the orientation to landscape when a video file is played and fill the whole viewable area with the actual video.

To focus the video, there’s a little glider switch on the bottom of the phone. I thought this would have been better placed on a side and should have been a wheel just because it would make the task of focusing the picture that much easier. In my tests and playing, I found that I would focus past the point of a crisp picture in either direction a few times before landing on the crisp picture.

Other features
While you probably came to drool over the video projection functionality of this phone, I think I should still point out everything else it has to offer. First of all, like many of Chinavasion’s phones, it’s a touch screen and comes with a stylus. Along with the touch screen, it has a normal phone key pad as well as left and right side navigation buttons, the internal and external projection buttons, the call and end/power buttons, a home button, and surrounding the home button is a 4 way navigational rocker button. That’s all just on the face of the phone. The left side includes the standard volume rocker buttons and the right has two input connections. I scratched my head a bit about the multiple inputs, but there’s certainly technical reasons for doing that. My guess is that it has a lot to do with the many things you can plug into this phone.

The user interface for this phone is strikingly familiar. It looks an works a lot like the iPhone. Actually, the interface looks almost exactly like the iPhone, from the layout right down to many of the icons. It doesn’t work as smoothly as the iPhone, but not much does, and really, they managed to pull over a couple of the nicer things into this phone. For example, unlocking or turning off the device with a swipe of the finger is still my favorite method.

You’ll find many of the standard applications, such as the web browser, calculator, note pad, camera, video, music player, etc. bundled into the phone’s software as well. One thing I’ve noticed with Chinavasion is that they tend to load their devices up with a lot of features and programs, which is a good thing.

What else comes with it?
Everything came is a white, plain box. This box included the phone, a user’s manual, a wall charger, a data cable/USB charger, a hands-free headset that also works as regular stero headphones, two batteries, and a wall battery-only charger for the extra battery. Again, Chinavasion likes to make sure you’re covered, so they throw in everything they can think of. I can almost never get everything back in the box with their products.

Video and conclusions
These days, a phone is a phone is a phone. What I mean is that for making calls, the hardware doesn’t vary much. It’s the design and everything else that the manufacturer packs into the phone that makes it the device you must have. In this case, Chinavasion has done a good job adding in all the stuff you’d expect from a phone plus a little more. Then they threw on this projector, a feature that has been talked about before but one that I (and most of the planet) have never seen implemented in a consumer-released cell phone until now. The projector has a few areas for improvement, I think, but over all, they did a great job with the device. While it’s a little heavy, I must remind myself that the extra weight is worth the additional “wow” factor. This is another great phone for the money.

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