UPDATE: As reader have pointed out, this is not a functioning Blackberry, rather a Pico projector built into a Blackberry shell.

Foxconn rolled out another handheld Pico Projector device at Computex this week, packing a .3-inch Texas Instruments DLP chip and 854x480 resolution into a small package roughly the size of a matchbox (just 65 grams). Though Pico Projectors have been supported by many heavyweights such as 3M, Texas Instruments and Motorola, the technology has yet to make an appearance in the consumer market. But more prototypes from different companies can't be a bad thing, right? [Aving via About Projectors]

Texas Instruments Announces IMAX Digital Projection System to be Powered by DLP Cinema® 2008 marks the 10th Anniversary of digital cinema led by DLP Cinema LAS VEGAS, NEVADA - March 11, 2008: Texas Instruments (TI) (NYSE: TXN) DLP Cinema® announced today at ShoWest that IMAX® Corporation (Nasdaq: IMAX) has decided to incorporate the DLP Cinema projector solution in its IMAX digital projection systems to be deployed by commercial exhibitors around the world. "We are excited to cement this alliance with DLP Cinema, and believe their technology will help ensure that our digital projection system delivers the best cinema experience available to audiences," said IMAX Co-Chairmen and Co-CEOs Richard L. Gelfond and Bradley J. Wechsler. "We've evaluated competing cinema projection technology and found DLP Cinema to be the ideal match for IMAX." IMAX's highly anticipated digital projection system integrates a suite of proprietary IMAX intellectual properties with the DLP Cinema projector solution in a way that creates The IMAX Experience in a digital format. IMAX expects its transition to digital to help to drive profitability for studios, exhibitors and IMAX theatres by virtually eliminating the need for film prints, increasing program flexibility and ultimately increasing the number of movies shown on IMAX screens. With the implementation of DLP Cinema technology, IMAX moviegoers will experience precise, lifelike images in vibrant colors, delivered through the millions of microscopic mirrors on the DLP Cinema chip. "We are proud to work with IMAX and look forward to the development and rollout of the best digital cinema experience in the market," said Nancy Fares, Business Manager for DLP Cinema Products Group. "DLP Cinema projectors are the heart of every digital 2D and 3D movie experience for traditional and now large format venues. We look forward to participating in their move to digital in the months ahead." Digital cinema installations continue to be catalyzed by the increasing release of 3D film. The 3D movie format is serving as a revenue driver for the film industry overall, and has gained a resurgence of interest by moviegoers. IMAX has been a leader in 3D content, especially since the overwhelming box office success of The Polar Express: An IMAX 3D Experience, which has grossed more than $65 million in IMAX theatres around the world since it opened in 2005. More recently, Beowulf: An IMAX 3D Experience grossed $25 million, representing a per screen average of more than $185,000. Celebrating its 10th year in the film industry, DLP Cinema projection technology is installed in over 6,000 theatres on every continent except Antarctica and is the only digital 3D single projector solution. Today there are more than 1,200 theatres in the country that offer the digital 3D experience powered by DLP Cinema technology, and this number will continue to increase as IMAX begins its rollout of digital projection systems powered by DLP Cinema. 10 Years of Digital Cinema 2008 marks the 10th Anniversary of DLP's entrance into the cinema industry, with the first fully functional and Hollywood endorsed digital DLP Cinema movie projector. After years of prototypes, DLP had delivered Hollywood's biggest image critics and cinematographers with a digital projector that met the world's highest standards on color, brightness and reliability and therefore pioneered the digital cinema concept. A year later in 1999 the studios released the first movie in digital format on DLP Cinema which was Star Wars: Episode I- The Phantom Menace. DLP Cinema honors the heritage of the ultimate viewing experience while incorporating the latest technology innovations, such as the 3D single projector solution, and cutting costs for cinema exhibitors, distributors and ultimately the consumer. About DLP Cinema DLP Cinema is a proprietary technology that delivers clear, sharp, bright and accurate images to movie theatres globally. To manufacture and market under the DLP Cinema trademark, technology licensees, including Barco, Christie and NEC, must meet stringent standards and guidelines meant to ensure the best possible performance and picture quality. This digital picture and standard of excellence ensures that a DLP Cinema movie screening looks flawless and each showing is as perfect as the first with no annoying scratches, tears or weaving that detract from the movie-going experience. For more information, or to find a DLP Cinema theatre near you, please visitwww.dlpcinema.com. About Texas Instruments DLP Products DLP display technology from Texas Instruments offers clarity down to the most minute detail, delivering pictures rich with color, contrast and brightness to large-screen HDTVs and projectors for business, home, professional venue and digital cinema (DLP Cinema®). 50 of the world's top projection and display manufacturers design, manufacture and market products based on DLP technology. DLP is the only HDTV technology built from a foundation in the digital cinema where it set the industry standard demonstrated by the deployment of DLP Cinema technology in 5,971 theatres worldwide. At the heart of every DLP chip is an array of up to 2.2 million microscopic mirrors which switch incredibly fast to create a high resolution, highly reliable, full color image. DLP technology's chip architecture and inherent speed advantage provides razor-sharp images and excellent reproduction of fast motion video. Since early 1996, more than 15.5 million DLP subsystems have been shipped. For more information, please visitwww.dlp.com. About Texas Instruments: Texas Instruments (NYSE: TXN) helps customers solve problems and develop new electronics that make the world smarter, healthier, safer, greener and more fun. A global semiconductor company, TI innovates through manufacturing, design and sales operations in more than 25 countries. For more information, www.ti.com. DLP and DLP Cinema are registered trademarks of Texas Instruments. About IMAX Corporation IMAX Corporation is one of the world's leading digital entertainment and technology companies. The worldwide IMAX network is among the most important and successful theatrical distribution platforms for major event Hollywood films around the globe, with IMAX theatres delivering the world's best cinematic presentations using proprietary IMAX, IMAX 3D, and IMAX DMR technology. IMAX DMR is the Company's groundbreaking digital remastering technology that allows it to digitally transform virtually any conventional motion picture into the unparalleled image and sound quality of The IMAX Experience. IMAX's renowned projectors and new digital systems display crystal-clear images on the world's biggest screens. The IMAX brand is recognized throughout the world for extraordinary and immersive entertainment experiences for consumers. As of September 30, 2007, there were 296 IMAX theatres operating in 40 countries. IMAX®, IMAX® 3D, IMAX DMR, and, IMAX MPX The IMAX Experience® are trademarks of IMAX Corporation. More information on the Company can be found at www.imax.com.

It's about as powerful as the first Pentium M chips (Banias), but while those idled at 5W and averaged 24.5W, this little guy sips as little as 0.1W in its idle state, with peaks up to just 2W on the 2GHz model. It's really cheap to pump out too, tapped for the $200 OLPC at one point.

It comes in a couple different flavors up to that 2GHz version. To get athletic performance—it's a full-fledged x86 chip, not a half-baked cutdown—out of an anorexic processor, Intel worked all kinds of design mojo, like a new quick-wake deep sleep state. It's still a bit too hungry for smartphones, though. So, while it's a neat piece of silicon, as Ars says, it's still got a ways to go, especfially with stiff competition from ARM and TI. But that's a good thing.

The Spin Just a few years prior to the TI-99/4A's 1981 debut, TI scored a major consumer-electronics hit with the Speak & Spell. The company's brand was thus closely identified with education applications, an advantage that it tried to press with cloying ads such as this one. TI really can't be faulted for this, as its competitors were similarly convinced that computers would become family machines—thus IBM's drive to release the disastrous PCjr. And since the computer had been dubbed "Machine of the Year" by Time in 1982, it made sense to try and tap into parental paranoia. Those of us who remember Logo lessons and CompuKids were swept up in the madness, told that we might as well resign ourselves to ditch-digging futures if we didn't learn BASIC ASAP. Except, uh, in this commercial the kid ain't even learning to write a three-line script; he's learning the letter R.

Counterspin The conventional wisdom on the TI-99/4A's failure is that it was a victim of a price war. But I'd claim that the family angle was wrong to begin with, since the limits of 1980s educational software are pretty obvious: is learning the letter R on a screen really that much different from learning it from a book? On top of that, the most important part of any budding geek's education is unfettered exploration, not convening with dad for supervised computing. (This was the era before the ubiquitous Internet, so Junior was a lot less likely to get cruised by online weirdos.) Okay, granted, three years old is a little young to figure out much. But even for older kids, there wasn't enough to do with the TI-99/4A, owing primarily to the dearth of software—a great lesson in why proprietary technology schemes can backfire. (Sony? Are you listening?)

Mission Accomplished? Obviously not, since it was only a few months after this commercial's debut that TI announced the end of its home-computer division. (The company made laptops for a while, though its line was eventually sold to Acer.) Thus began the era of the PC clone, when computing really came to the masses. (The era of the Mac, of course, was also about to dawn.) Perhaps TI could have staved that off a bit by presenting the TI-99/4A as more than a glorified Speak & Spell, but its problems ran deeper than mere marketing buffoonery. The company went wrong by locking users in to proprietary software, and by thinking that consumers cared more about brands than ease-of-use. Good thing TI had that whole semiconductor business to fall back on.

Hype-O-Meter 2.5 (out of 10). A failure in terms of selling units, of course, but there's something sweetly innocent here, too. I mean, c'mon, check out that slogan: "Creating useful services and products for you." We've come a long way.

Brendan I. Koerner is a contributing editor at Wired, a columnist for Slate, and author of the forthcoming Now the Hell Will Start. His Hype Sheet column appears every Thursday on Gizmodo.

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(Thanks to milwaukeetvmadman for posting the video.)

Letter Logger consists of a powerful microprocessor developed by Texas Instruments, and a low-power consumption uBlox ANTARIS 4 GPS module, and is powered by a slim 1100mAh battery. It can be deployed in two different ways. Users can choose to receive reports every two, five or ten minutes (which would, I think, drive you nuts) if Letter Logger is in Constant mode, or they can go for Tilt mode, which notifies you only when the envelope is tilted. Constant mode gives you 20 hours' battery life, while Tilt mode will keep tabs for two weeks.

The service starts up on January 2 next year and it won't be available to the general public. It's a shame the British Government's Customs and Revenue department didn't have access to this when the CD-Rs containing 25 million people's bank details got lost in transit earlier this month. [Tracking the World via Engadget]

Denver, CO - September 6, 2007: DLP® Products from Texas Instruments (TI) (NYSE: TXN) today announced the introduction of a new chipset, DarkChip™ 4, that furthers the position of DLP as a leader in picture quality and contrast ratio. The new chipset is reported to deliver 30% or more increase in native contrast ratio depending upon the application. All DLP product lines, including DLP HDTVs, DLP 1-chip projectors and DLP 3-chip projectors currently feature products with various chipset iterations of DarkChip technology. The new DarkChip4 will be available in a number of products in 2008.

"Using our current DLP chipsets, our customers have built some of the most competitive Home Theater products in the market, all with excellent picture quality," said Lars Yoder, vice president, DLP Front Projection Business Unit at TI. "We are proud to introduce the next generation of the DLP chip for future product implementations. It will provide our customers even more flexibility for designing projectors that can meet the needs of a wide range of markets."

The DarkChip 4 process was first developed for the high brightness and contrast picture quality requirements of the digital cinema industry, of which DLP Cinema® is the founder and uncontested world leader. The contrast improvements from DarkChip 4 are achieved by advances in mirror design lithography and other proprietary process changes.

DLP uses a streamlined optical system that efficiently reflects light to the screen, resulting in a stunning viewing experience - crisper whites, ultra-rich blacks and images that "pop" on-screen, making it ideal for unforgettable presentations or movies. DLP-based products are known for their native contrast ratio levels which ultimately sets minimum product contrast ratio level for all scene content. Native contrast ratio also sets the "black level" of the system.

"We are constantly searching and innovating new ways to create simply the best HDTV experience. The better the native contrast performance our mirrors can deliver, the more images will jump of the screen," said Adam Kunzman, DLP HDTV business manager. "This breakthrough, combined with our other innovations, vibrant colors, high resolution, clarity and digital imaging, gives our customers a competitive and unique advantage in the marketplace".

At CEDIA (booth #620) DLP is showing multiple demonstrations, of the capabilities of the new chipset innovation. The DLP DarkChip™ 4 Theater features a 3 chip, 1080p DLP projector featuring the new chipset producing trillions of colors combined with a native contrast ratio of 15,000:1. Additionally, there is a demonstration of a DLP HDTV with DarkChip 4 and LED illumination with a native contrast performance beyond 100,000 to 1.

For more information about DLP technology and select product demonstrations with the new DarkChip 4 chipset, visit DLP at booth #620 on the show floor at CEDIA.

I can't wait to see what the teacher thinks when I spell out BOOBS on my calculator. –Travis Hudson

Calculators tell teachers which pupils need help [News.com]

A few select journalists got a flash at this year's CES, but no photos were allowed—until now. Texas Instruments is showing off its Pico, a DLP projector that is chiquitito enough to be incorporated into the bottom of a cellphone.

The 1.5-inch gizmo, which contains three lasers, a DLP chip capable of driving widescreen TV images, and a power supply, can be used to beam DVD-quality video onto a wall or a screen, giving you a bigger image than anything you'd find on even the biggest smartphone LCD screen. Two more pics of a nekkid Pico and its DLP chip after the jump. Oh, and need I say that the phone is obviously phake?

TI demos its movie projector in a phone [CNet News]

– Ad Dugdale

USB OTG Kills Time during Calculus Class [Everything USB]

– Matt Buchanan

The projector recently dropped from $4,340 to $2,436 USD.

Product Page [Via Trusted Reviews]

Check prices on Toshiba multimedia projectors [Shopping.com]

Props for the Mobile DTV alliance, formed by bigwigs including Nokia, Intel Corp., Motorola, Texas Instruments and Modeo. Looks like we won't have to wait as long as we may have thought for good DVB-H, mobile TV technology in the states. I know I've been experiencing some TV envy lately after watching Europe and Asia get cool shows on their cellphones, so this alliance is aiming at creating open standards for TV broadcasts to mobiles, focusing on the North American market. The alliance is looking to have a DVB-H infrastructure ready for use by 2007. That's only a year away! Great, now I can throw away all those lame books I own and stick strictly to TV.

Nokia, Motorola, Intel form alliance for mobile TV [Reuters]

Texas Instruments offers new phone chip for Asia [Reuters]

New Mitsubishi Projector Uses New TI Tech [DesignTechnica]

Prices and reviews for available Mitsubishi DLP projectors [CNET]