I wreckon as the technology progresses apple will get into it…its not like they have ever shyed away from multimedia technology!

http://www.microprojector5.co.uk/2009/09/high-resolution-micro-projector-a-better-pico-projector/

“I do a lot of presentations, and I was surprised to discover the iPhone has no projector function. This will surely stymie it’s deployment throughout our company.” Head of Sales & Marketing at a large financial institution in New York, USA.

All good fun, eh…

Since more and more people are turning into distributed organisations, and the majority of tech-progression is made by quite small companies and often in a open source environment it might not be long until the development-chain is reversed also in hardware.

One of the main problems (my problems) when you are a web-worker/distributed team is that you have to carry heavy and large equipment around with you. I carry my Mac Book Pro and a Sony Ericsson P1i as my main work-devices … and that too me is really large, heavy and unflexible. What I want and need is a ultra small (cell phone sized) info/data-hub, a device with no hard drive just a processor, wifi, projection and a projected/foldable keyboard. With that I could reach all my online documents/online desktop and work with it without the heavy backpack/bag.

Since the “major players” today often is small and distributed they share the same issues as other web-workers (and not the issues of large multi national corporations). They will start to develop hardware that is solving their issues and at the same time make the technology available to the rest of the public.

So I think that in a very near future we will see cell-phone-sized devices with microprojectors, hi-speed wifi, soft/foldable or projected keyboards that will make out laptops obsolete. That will be the new “online workstation”.

It may take a while to get started, but it will eventually be as routine as phones with web connections are now. It hits directly one one of the biggest pain points in present technology, mini-screens.

Remember, technology needs to filter down from larger, power-hungry equipment to smaller and yet smaller devices. We still haven’t seen an amazingly small projector on it’s own with this technology. When it advances, we’ll see it in large business laptops, then maybe smaller ones, then maybe cell phones.

Along this course, the market will decide if it’s worth of continued development into the next, smaller device. I suspect not.

As for the wires, I’d prefer using bluetooth on a standalone unit.