There are times when a cell-phone screen just isn't big enough. Even a beefy Apple
That's why Texas Instruments
A further shrinkage of the display engines you see in TI has shown us this technology before through Hewlett-Packard
So even though DLP Pico is available today, it remains a sort of future technology that is waiting for fatter batteries and super-efficient lights to catch up with the chip. TI hasn't told us what the chips will cost, though large-scale DLP drivers were estimated at about $190 a pop two years ago. If the new, tiny product lives in that pricing neighborhood, that's going to mean very expensive projector phones. The company quoted independent research that supports a market of about 1 million tiny projectors like this by 2010, be they TI's or someone else's. Let's be extremely charitable and give TI a 100% market share; with 1 million units times a generous $200 price point, you still end up with a very small impact on TI's $13.8 billion annual sales.
Solve the technical limitations, and it's whole new ball game. For now, it's an oddity that should interest only the true-blue, long-term investors among us. Well, and the compulsive video-sharing freaks. But that's another story.
Further Foolishness: