You would think that a built-in Pico Projector would just kill a battery in an hour or two. Frankly I would assume the battery would be done within minutes considering my Motorola Atrix 4G lasts about 2-3 hours with the network settings on and playing a game. The team over at GSM Arena has put the Galaxy Beam through its paces and tested the battery in multiple areas such as video playback, idle time, and most importantly projections. The team found that the battery was surprisingly resilient.
The Samsung I8530 Galaxy Beam is fairly unique as it includes a pico projector embedded and a 2000 mAh battery. Almost as big as the Galaxy 3 battery. The 4” LCD and dual-core processor don’t stress the battery too much. On talk time it did well shooting for around 9 hours.
Video playback also put it in a really good spot to be a top contender phone if people don’t mind the extra bulkiness with the projector they can get a pocket cinema inside your phone, which is convenient because you’ll always carry that on your person as a necessary tool.
The most impressive aspect I thought was that the projector had considerable idle time while projecting. This literally means that the processor is rendering video, projecting, and powering the screen and still managing to pull 3-4 hours of playtime from a single charge. Pretty impressive for a phone that is not getting much buzz from the general public. As the GSM Arena writers state:
We also tested how long the phone will last while watching movies with the built-in projector (Samsung is promising up to 3 hours or runtime). We set the projector at 100% brightness (the projector is rated at 15 lumen) and kept the screen on (its brightness was set to 50%). The Galaxy Beam surpassed Samsung’s official estimates – we waited 3 hours and 54 minutes before the phone threw in the towel.
This is probably some of the best results I’ve seen on a phone. Let alone a phone that comes packed with a projector. Although on web browsing it doesn’t do as good, it’s true appeal has to be the projection package. We also learned that the projector will ship with a spare battery and spare battery charger. that’s a lot to convince anyone to jump on this emerging technology early.
