In my last post I talked about mobile phones with projectors in them. This means that the small screen can become a big screen (then I saw this article about 3M designing miniature projectors today). So will this mean that all our business designing for the small screen and building mobile sites will dry up?

Well the answer is no. Even if ALL new phones have new projectors in them, it would take 18 to 24 months for those devices to get in people’s hands, so there will be 3 to 4 years before projectors become ubiquitous (god I HATE that word!). It took as long for cameras to get in all phones, which is pretty much is now; but remember the first one was on there 5 years ago.

More importantly, the nature of projectors is that you need to remain in one place (to project on to something), and the nature of mobile is that you engage alot of the the time, when you are on the move; and those two things don’t go together. 

What it does mean is that mobile TV and mobile movies become more viable. Imagine going to iTunes (or bit torrent – lets be honest) with your phone and downloading a movie, then watching it wherever you find a nice surface. And the good thing is that it will look cool (so as I said, the geeks and gadget lovers will love it).