Mobile phones with projectors! Marketer’s dream?
There have been a couple of companies working on shrinking projector technology to embed into mobile phones for a couple of years now. I’ve seen a few prototypes from Texas Instruments (chipset OEM), Microvision, 3M and Motorola (Symbol Technologies). Very cool stuff, but a couple days ago there was news circulating through the blogosphere that the first production model handset complete with a projector embedded was actually for sale. The phone had been announced in mid-June of this year. 
The Epoq EGP-PP01 from China’s C-King is (apparently) the world’s first commercially available projector phone. It features a world/ tri-band GSM unlocked mobile phone with touch screen, multimedia record and playback and micro-projection module that can project stored images and video as large as 30 inch diagonal on most surfaces.
First off, did you notice the iPhone icons on the sample image??! A closer look reveals that nearly all of them are exact copies. Engadget has blown the image up so you can see the Chinese characters.
Placing cloning discussions aside for the moment, try to imagine a world where large numbers of teenagers are carrying mobile phones equipped with projectors. The vision of influential teens displaying an MMS, mobile internet page, video clip or unique application on their school locker with a major brand located somewhere for an audience to see is intriguing. The “I want that too” viral quotient could be off the charts and the idea of a moving billboard becomes a reality. Viral video and social networking also would get a big boost.
(NOTE: If you think mobile advertising reporting is tough now, tracking impressions in this sort of scenario would be an extremely difficult to say the least.)
This concept along with my previous post on leveraging mobile SD cards for marketing purposes are just two examples of how fast mobile technology is evolving and thus creating new marketing opportunities via the handset. Granted we are still trying to figure out SMS and banner ads, but the future looks promising!
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August 25th, 2008 at 7:25 pm
[...] admin wrote an interesting post today onHere’s a quick excerptFirst off, did you notice the iPhone icons on the sample image??! A closer look reveals that nearly all of them are exact copies. Engadget has blown the image up so you can see the Chinese characters. Placing cloning discussions aside … [...]