Sony Xperia Touch G1109
Turning your table into a touchscreen is a sci-fi delight, but the Touch is an expensive prototype
Is this the future? Where the walls in your house can be thumbed, fingered and stroked? Where digital wallpaper decks your living room in scenes of pastoral bliss, your kitchen is wall-to-wall recipes, your bedroom a constellation of Facebook notifications? That’s Sony’s vision, and while the Xperia Touch falls short of perfection it does provide a fascinating glimpse into what the next decade might hold.
But let’s not race away. The Xperia Touch is essentially an ultra short throw projector that runs Android 7 and, on specification alone, sounds more like a phone: there’s a 13-megapixel camera, built-in speakers, a microSD slot, Wi-Fi and Bluetooth 4.2, plus a USB-C and micro-HDMI port. There’s no SIM slot, but video calling is a possibility if you’re hooked up to Wi-Fi. Screen sharing also works, both wireless and via a wired connection.
Weighing 932g and measuring 69 x 134 x 143mm, it’s dinky enough to fit inside a backpack. Plonk it on a surface and it will project a 23in image that can be touched much like a tablet. Stick it by a wall and it can scale the projection up to 80in diagonal. In theory, it can turn almost any white surface in your home into a touchscreen, or pull it back to make a canvas for larger, more standard projections. Excited? Don’t be. In practice, this ambition falls short.
Sitting on a kitchen surface, shifting between online recipes, video messages and YouTube clips is when the Xperia Touch makes most sense. Plugged into the mains and tucked beside the toaster, the device makes for a handy mini-projector, and the touchscreen’s sensitivity is adequate for swiping between apps while cooking. As you’re only dealing with the kitchen surface, it doesn’t matter if you spill a drop of wine over the “screen”, or if your fingers are wet. Want to make way for the roast? Just move the projector and it will automatically refocus its display.
But the Sony Xperia Touch is a penny shy of £1,400, and that’s a great
“Sitting on a kitchen surface, plugged into the mains and tucked beside the toaster, the Touch makes for a handy mini-projector”
deal of money to spend on a device that only solves the problem of sticky fingers in the kitchen. While the version of Android Nougat on the device is comprehensible if you’re familiar with Android phones, it’s far from optimised for touchscreen projectors. Try to type an email and you’ll be faced with a keyboard that covers half the display, with a level of responsiveness that makes it impossible to do sustained work. Playing games with projected light is entertaining for guests, but the latency between touches quickly becomes frustrating after the first game of Fruit Ninja.
Things get even worse when you set the Xperia Touch beside a wall. Place it directly against the surface and the projector will shine its 23in display upwards, or pull the device backwards to scale the screen up to 80in. But with a resolution of 1,366 x 768 and a paltry brightness of 100 lumens, don’t expect to see much detail at this size unless all the blinds have been drawn.
Touchscreen functionality is patchy even at the smallest scale: pull the device backward to watch a film and there’s no way to control what’s happening onscreen. The Sony Xperia Touch doesn’t come with a separate controller, so you’ll have to set a movie running on a horizontal surface, and then quickly flip to vertical. Not great if you need a bathroom break.
Throw in only one hour of battery life and you have a device that’s burdened with too many practical flaws to be the all-in-one tablet-slash-projector it clearly dreams of being. As a prototype for a nascent technology, the Xperia Touch’s shortcomings are forgivable. For a £1,400 product, they’re fatal. If you’re looking for an exceptional projector for films or gaming, there are plenty of stellar options for less than £1,000, including the BenQ W2000. While the Sony Xperia Touch’s touch support is unique, and has a certain degree of novelty appeal, its problems highlight how far touch projectors have to go before they stand a chance of becoming commonplace.