Update: Samsung's Galaxy Beam has finally landed in the UK. The device, which is available to buy now, including from the Carphone Warehouse, is yet to be assigned a SIM-free price-point, however, it's being offered for free on a number of tarriffs. We'll soon be posting a full review of the handset - until then, read below for our first impressions.

Remember Samsung’s world’s first projector phone from 2010? Well, it’s making a return in the form of the Samsung Galaxy Beam.

This time, it comes running on Android 2.3 Gingerbread and beaming your videos, pics and digital content up to 50-inches in size courtesy of a built-in ultra-bright 15 lumens projector.

Launched at MWC 2012, alongside the Samsung Galaxy Note 10.1 tablet, the Galaxy Beam was one of the more unusual products at the show. We went hands-on...

Samsung Galaxy Beam: Build

As you'd expect from a phone that houses its own projector, the Samsung Galaxy Beam is a little on the chunky side, with a 12.5mm profile (compared to the slimline 8.49 of the Samsung Galaxy S2), while it weighs in at 145.3g.

The bright yellow finish is certainly distinctive and actually quite attractive although it does rather remind us of the Wasp T12 Speechtool from Nathan Barley.

Samsung Galaxy Beam: Features

Not only does it look very slightly similar to Barley's preposterous Wasp T12, the Galaxy Beam also has a built-in projector in common with Barley's phone.

However, while Barley used his to project rude words onto people's foreheads in restaurants, the idea with the Beam is to, er, beam video (or websites) onto the wall.

The phone supports MPEG4, H.264, WMV, Xvid and DivX files, so you're fairly well covered when it comes to video.

The tiny built-in bulb, which beams out of the top end of the handset offers 15 lumens of brightness. Images can be projected up to 50in, although naturally the quality isn't comparable to the picture you'd get from a home cinema projector on the same size area.

The focus can be adjusted by using the phone's volume control, located on the edge of the handset. The projector function worked well in our demo, although it really needs a dark room to get the best effect.

The phone also features a 5-megapixel rear-mounted camera with integrated flash on board, complete with video recording capabilities, along with a 1.3-megapixel snapper on the front.

Although we didn't really try out the cameras as we were more concerned with the projector capabilities. We'll take a closer look in our full review.

Samsung Galaxy Beam: Screen

The Galaxy Beam sports a fairly average 4-inch TFT LCD screen with a WVGA resolution of 800x480 pixels. The picture was clear enough, but not really in the same league as top-tier smartphones like the Apple iPhone 4S.

Samsung Galaxy Beam: Performance

There's no sign of Ice Cream Sandwich here as the Samsung Galaxy Beam runs Android 2.3 Gingerbread on a relatively standard 1GHz dual-core processor.

We didn't experience any lag or problems with the UI but that's something we'll be looking at more closely in our full review. The phone also offers 8GB of internal storage, which is expandable to 32GB via microSD card.

Samsung Galaxy Beam: Battery

The onboard 2000mAh battery is said to offer three hours of projecting time, but that's something we'll be testing out in our full review.

Samsung Galaxy Beam: Verdict

The Samsung Galaxy Beam may be a little quirky, but it's colourful design and projector skills certainly made it stand out from the crowd at MWC.

Many will struggle to find a scenario where they'd need to project a video onto a wall using their phone, but it's a interesting idea and we look forward to testing it in more detail.

Samsung Galaxy Beam availability: Out now

Samsung Galaxy Beam price: Contract (various), SIM-free (TBC)