Lenovo Pocket Projector review – hands on

Lenovo was showing off a miniature projector at MWC. The Pocket Projector is about the size of a stack of five floppy disks, for those old enough to remember those. Pico projectors have been around for a long time, but many have sub-30 lumens light outputs, so create a pretty dim picture, and brighter models tend to be expensive.

The Lenovo model has a 50-lumen output, which makes it one of the brighter models available, and comes in at a reasonable $249 (around £160). It’s battery-powered and charges via USB, so will work well with your other portable devices, and Lenovo claims it will last two and a half hours on a single charge. You also get built-in stereo speakers, which will be fine for the odd YouTube video or audio-containing presentation, but won’t of course set your movies alight.

Lenovo claims the Pocket Projector is bright enough to create up to an 110-inch screen. The lens is on a friction hinge, so will rotate up to 90 degrees for projection on the ceiling. It also has auto-keystoning to straighten up your projected picture’s verticals. We played the Avengers Assemble trailer through the projector with a screen around 32in in size, and it was plenty bright enough to enjoy the film once we’d dimmed the lights.

Like many portable projectors, the Pocket Projector is designed to help you share your screen with others; two people clustering around a phone or tablet is fine, but with more than that things get a little intimate. To this end the Pocket Projector supports DLNA and Miracast, so you can share your Android, Windows Phone or Windows 8.1 screen with the projector wirelessly. Your other option is to put your files on a microSD card and plug it into the projector – there’s no composite or VGA input for a wired video connection.

The Pocket Projector will be available in May worldwide, and we’ll have a review sample soon.