Texas Instruments Expects Big Things From Little Projectors

Texas Instruments (TI) thinks that projectors built into handsets will be just as popular as the camera feature commonly found in today’s phones. John Van Scoter, TI’s senior vice president and general manager of DLP Products expects them to grow in popularity over the next 5-10 years. For acronym enthusiasts, DLP stands for Digital Light Processing.

Announced back in February, the DLP Pico chipset has an imaging chip and processor that can be easily worked into a handset. Van Scoter indicated that there are some companies already at work, developing products around the technology and expects to see them roll out later this year.

Doing a little bit of math, there are over 3 billion handsets out there with around 1 billion sold annually. Putting these into one half of one percent (.005) would put 5 million of these on the street. So who integrates these into their devices? Let’s assume/pretend some of these “clients” working on TI’s projectors are other members of the Open Handset Alliance. Will we see Android phones with mobile projectors?

What kind of applications do you see mobile projectors working with, aside from the obvious capability of playing movies?