MWC 2012: Hands-on with the Samsung Galaxy Beam

A dark, sweat-scented, tiny cupboard of a room is not the sort of place you'd expect Samsung to put one of its very recently announced smartphones.

But, then again, the Samsung Galaxy Beam is hardly your run-of-the-mill Android device.

The darkness in the room is for a reason. Tucked away at the top of the phone is a little projector, capable of pushing out a mirror image up to 50 inches in size of what's displayed on-screen.

The projector does add a little bit more bulk to this smoothly shaped Android device, mind, with the handset measuring in at 12.5mm.

It's hardly Xperia Play standards, though, and doesn't make placing the phone in a pocket (or, in my case, holding in a dark room) particularly troublesome.

A dedicated projector button in the top-right corner of the device switches on the beam, while holding down the button when switched off changes the plane between a horizontal and vertical display.

The brightness of the device is a fairly modest 15 lumens, which meant that any light seeping in did rather dim the clarity somewhat. This lack of brightness, however, means that the beam should last for up to 3 hours between charges.

Samsung has provided dedicated software for managing the projector, which can be used to gain access to some of the more unusual features that the latter makes possible through its inclusion.

One of the most striking aspects of the projector was how presentations were displayed by the phone. Instead of just displaying the incredibly generic example business diagrams inside the testing room, the Galaxy Beam also allows you to add a pointer or draw onto the image using the touchscreen - a nifty extra if you have steady hands.

You can also, if you like, use the projector as a dedicated flashlight. It's not going to blind too many small nocturnal animals, but it's another interesting implementation of the phone's highly unique element.

Putting the projector to one side for a second, the Galaxy Beam looks to be a solid, if not incredible, device.

Its dual-core 1GHz processor meant that it seemed to move at a decent speed when navigating through its menus, but the lack of Android Ice Cream Sandwich at launch will turn off a lot of tech heads.

Samsung has, however, promised an OS update is forthcoming, but it seems odd that Android 4.0 it wasn't included in the first place, especially given that the company's other new handsets are running the most up-to-date version of Google's OS.

Still, the projector means that the Galaxy Beam will definitely stand out from the crowd, especially if it lands in the mid-range sector of the market.

We'll find out if this is the case when Samsung launches the Galaxy Beam later this year.