Why you can trust TechRadar We spend hours testing every product or service we review, so you can be sure you’re buying the best. Find out more about how we test.
Projector aside, the Samsung Galaxy Beam is a decent phone. Decent, but not excellent. It runs a fairly dated version of the Android OS, which slows it down on occasion when the home screens are fully loaded with apps and a couple of them are running in the background.
We liked
The Samsung Galaxy Beam has great battery life and can run all the major networking apps and games with ease. The additional battery provided is also a plus.
There's 8GB internal storage with the MicroSD option of adding 32GB on top of that. The camera produces some good snaps, though it is only 5MP.
And despite the projector, the Galaxy Beam is a sturdy piece of kit and surprisingly light too.
We disliked
Admittedly it sounds potentially cool – a projector! On your phone! – but the novelty soon wears off when you have to wait for complete darkness and even then, the quality of the projection isn't high-def enough to particularly blow you away.
It runs fairly well but if you're looking for an Android upgrade for around the same money, surely you'd be sniffing around the Samsung Galaxy S3 with its quad-core processor, Ice Cream Sandwich OS and other enviable specs.
Verdict
All-in-all, we're a little pushed to find more than a couple of random things you might need a projector for. You could go old-school and make people sit through a literal slide show of your holiday snaps.
Or you could possibly be out in the middle of nowhere with nothing but a sheep to project a film onto the side of.
Or, of course, maybe you really do want to use it in-situ at a meeting. But other than that, what are you going to do with it? It needs a quiet, incredibly dark place to make the viewing possible…so, props to Samsung for running with this, but we don't see the hordes needing a middling smartphone with projector addendum just yet.
Big thanks to Expansys for sending us our review unit.
