The Moviphone from Wireless Mobi Solutions is a smartphone with a 5.5 inch, 1920 x 1080 pixel display, a MediaTek 6750 octa-core processor, 128GB of storage, and a 4,000 mAh battery.

It’s available for purchase from Moviphones.com for $600, which seems kind of steep for a phone with those specs… until you realize that this phone also has a built-in pico projector.

It’d actually be kind of easy to miss that fact, because the phone isn’t all that much thicker than a typical Android handset, and it’s only a little heavier.

The phone uses a 50 lumen laser projector that has a resolution of 1280 x 720 pixels. Wireless Mobi Solution says it can beam images up to 100 inches across, although it’ll probably look sharper and brighter if you stick to somewhat smaller screens.

Theoretically you could use this sort of projector to project movies on a big screen at home, but I suspect the projector is going to be more practical for occasional bursts of activity such as displaying presentations during business meetings or sharing short home movies.

You fire up the projector by opening an app on the phone, which helpfully reminds you not to point the projector at your eyes while it’s in use. Once it’s up and running, anything visible on your screen will be beamed out through the projector.

When shining the projector at a white surface a few feet away in a reasonably bright room, I had no problem seeing videos, apps, or the Android home screen. Speaking of the home screen, it’s locked to portrait orientation, which means the projected image is also in portrait. If you want to watch videos in landscape orientation you’ll need to rotate your screen first otherwise you’ll see a smaller video window.

Everything looked a little better in person than it does in the video embedded in this post. I blame the interaction between my camera and the laser projector, which caused some colors to look a little more muted, and even caused the video to be obscured from some angles.

The phone is compatible with AT&T and T-Mobile networks in the US.

While the phone is up for order, the company was still waiting on FCC and Google Mobile Service certification as of a few weeks ago, so you may have to wait a little while before you can get your hands on one.

Wireless Mobi Solution is also planning to launch a higher-end model with a faster processor and an 80-lumen, 1080p projector in the second half of 2018. It’ll likely sell for about $800.

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8 replies on “Moviphone is a $600 smartphone with a built-in projector”

  1. Is it laser light or actual lasers (like the picobit or the Sony mp-cl1?)

    1. Not quite sure what you mean but the projector is by Microvision , same provider as the 2 products you mention.

      1. Well. Some products use a laser backlight but still have dlp or whatnot (as a result you can still get dead pixels as seen in one review of such a product). Some others “paint”the picture with a laser akin to how old CRTs work

        1. Almost certainly still DLP since the alternative would need some tiny, high-strength, high accuracy motors to point the lasers. Those little motors would then be mounted in a device that moves, shakes, gets dropped. It’d be a nightmare to make that work. With DLP the chip itself is fairly hardy and you’d have no need of a colour wheel in this setup so you’re down to 0 moving parts, much better.

          1. You forgot to mention the little diesel engine too… It’s LBS, not DLP, it uses tiny mirrors to direct / scan the laser pulses. Technology by Microvision

    2. It is the same technology. Those projectors from Sony contain laser projection technology from Microvision PICO scanning engines, and this is the first embedded cellphone using the same technology. In other countries the technology is being introduced on the Voga V brand by Ragentek, and in Brazil it is the Quantum V brand. I think it is quite exciting and personally feel like any phone with a camera should have a laser projector.

      1. I have the picobit and I love the image quality. The downside for this phone is that the video capabilities of this phone aren’t great due to the processor used. With the projector I can are least connect any source. If they do come out with a 1080p option hopefully they’ll choose to pair it with a more capable SoC.

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