MOVI is a Weird Smartphone with a Projector That You Can Pre-order… Half a Year From Now

If you are really into projectors, especially the portable-mobile kind, but don’t see yourself picking up the Moto Z with the Projector Mod when it releases because reasons, you’d be glad to know that you will have another option down the road.

Meet WMS’s MOVI Smart Cinema Smartphone, which as you may have guessed from its name, is a smartphone with a cinema experience.

On paper (website actually), the MOVI Smartphone promises to be “one of the most feature rich smartphone in the market with HD pico projector”. As much as we’d like to encourage newer brands to induce more competition in the market, some products and their accompanying release materials induce a very healthy dose of skepticism in our systems. If you head on over to the project website, you’ll see why we are skeptic, and you’d agree as well that some signs point to it being vaporware.

Starting off, the premise of the phone is simple and believable: you take a phone and add in a pico projector. Sounds good so far. Then you make the phone spec rich by promising a package that consists of the Snapdragon 821 (brand-new), 4GB RAM, 64GB onboard storage and 128GB of expandability through microSD. Still continues to be believable, so let’s move forward. Then you add in all the extras that flagships and higher end phones these days have, like a USB Type C port, wireless charging, quick charging, a 16MP rear + 5MP front camera setup, fingerprint sensor… Still good so far (too good, even). But then the display size gets mentioned as 5.2″ or 5.5″ FHD, and you raise up some ears.  When you mention a 5,000 mAh battery and Android 7.0 Nougat out of the box, it does start looking too good to be true. Can it actually deliver?

I am not saying that this is vaporware, but we need to learn a little more at this point. The MOVI Smartphone could very well turn out to be a real smartphone with a pico projector but to find out if it is all it promises to be, you will have to wait about half a year before you can pre-order the phone for an unspecified amount. Until then, you will have to be content with the render images of the device, where a racing game played portrait is magically shown to be stretched out in landscape when it is projected through the pico projector. Or you can feast your eyes on the renders of the software that show outdated iconography (KitKat called, it wants its icon-pack back) while the spec sheet promises the latest of Android. Or you can check out those images where the MOVI Smartphone projects an image of a MOVI Smartphone projecting an image, because meta is in these days.

We’ll see what comes out of this device, and we hope to find out more about it, and whether it’s indeed a plausible package that we can enjoy soon. It might actually be a legit alternative that’ll surprise us, who knows. But right now the premise is undermined by the available information and media, so we hope MOVI convinces us this is a project worth following (and also that they will update their icons).

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