The Smartphone Gets New Friends

"Ask an american kid if you were to take his cellphone or his PC away, which one would he kill you for." - Scott McNealy, responding to a question on the future of personal computing.

So you review your powerpoint slides on your PDA while the taxi winds its way through traffic, but wish you could simply walk into the conference room and display them? Or wish you didn't have to rush out the room at the end of the meeting to get prints of the minutes?

If computing is getting condensed into mobile phones, other ubiquitous applications of the PC and the notebook cannot afford stay far behind. A combination of computing power, wireless broadband and advanced mobile OS's have allowed us to replicate e-mail, browsing, gaming, music and photo sharing in our phones. Yet, two powerful functions of PC / notebooks seem to be missing all the action - printing and projection. (The smartphone-toting exec in the Microsoft ad would probably have e-mailed the presentation to his colleague who carried his laptop to the meeting, and then used bluetooth to switch his slides back and forth.)

But innovations by three startup firms, and surprisingly not from Silicon Valley, are looking to put the monolithic office printer and projecter in your pocket as early as next year.

First up: ImagineOptix - a startup by professors and alumni of North Carolina State Univ - is working on handheld micro-projectors using a technology similar to Liquid Crystal on Silicon (LCoS) but is brighter. A cellphone-attachment is also in the works.

The second innovation is also in the cellphone projector space and uses the same LCoS technology. The creator - Light Blue Optics (LBO) - is a Cambridge based startup by a mix of Cambridge and Oxford alumni. As opposed to ImagineOptix's device, which uses mirrors to focus images, LBO's device uses an array of lenses that allows it a throw angle greater than 90 degrees. This means that the image size of LBO's device is is larger than that of ImagineOptix at the same distance from the projection wall. While nobody is disclosing the prices yet, press coverages of ImagineOptix expect a "low cost" proposition.

The third innovation is a very refreshing idea in the dull inkjet printing space - one that could create a whole new range of applications for printing devices. A Swedish firm called PrintDreams is developing handheld printers that can give you full A4 size prints - and without any paper jams. How does it do it? It's like a mouse that you can sweep over the printing surface with your hand and it prints underneath using a technology called RMPT, which stands for Random Movement Printing Technology. So you need not print only on A4 paper; you can print inside a notebook, on a birthday card and even on a t-shirt. Indeed, the company is working on a fun toy for kids called Whoosh that can print their favourite cartoon characters on drawing books as well as the walls of drawing rooms :)

Imagine the possibilities if it could also scan!