Menlo Park, California, USA – January 5, 2012. Pacific Media Associates (PMA) have released their findings on the current use and future purchase intentions for pico projectors. These mobile gadgets are tiny battery-powered models that are either standalone accessories for mobile devices (e.g., laptops, cellphones, tablets, or digital cameras) or embedded in many of the same mobile devices. Major findings of the survey covered future demand for pico projectors, attach and embedded rates for various mobile devices, and key features, applications, and price points.
This is the fourth set of important results from PMAs sixth biennial large-scale (1000 responses) and statistically-representative survey of United States users and intenders of front projectors, both individual consumers and organizations. The survey focused on topics of timely interest, including requests for additional or modified questions from PMAs extensive client base of front projector manufacturers.
“We were surprised to find such high levels of interest in pico projectors,” says Dr. William Coggshall, President of PMA. “We always find high levels of interest in such surveys, but usually the figures are more in the 40-60% range. Our 2009 End User Survey showed only 44% of organizational respondents and 53% of individual consumers had such intentions. We suspect that in the intervening two years the products features and performance have improved substantially enough to be interesting to organizations, and the whole notion of such gadgets has become a lot more familiar to consumers.”
Of course, mobile devices in general have gotten a lot better and a lot more popular. 97% of all survey respondents routinely carry cellphones with them (more than half of these are smartphones). 45% of them carry notebook or netbook PCs. And 10% of them carry a projector (half of these are battery-powered, half are wall-powered).
The survey also revealed where usersboth professionals in organizations and individual consumerswant to have an embedded pico projector. Contrary to conventional wisdom, it’s not in cellphones. In fact, cellphones are only the fourth most popular configuration for both groups of users. In first place is laptops. “This agrees with what manufacturers tell us anecdotally,” according to Coggshall. “And it is logical, because those mobile PCs contain a wealth of information that their owners want to share.”