Chinese electronics firm Honor, formerly a subsidiary of Huawei until it went solo a few years back, has moved on from its smartphones and wearables to launch what appears to be its first ever projector. It’s a funky little thing too, with a compact gimbal to support setup flexibility, AI-enabled gesture controls and even a stylus for users who want to doodle on the wall or screen.
The Honor Choice Projector Air, as it’s called, joins the growing collection of smaller, semi-portable and lower-cost projectors, offering 1080p resolution and 280 CVIA lumens of brightness. Its capable of throwing up images of up to 160-inches on any surface or wall, and its contrast ratio is said to be 2,500:1.
Those are pretty basic specifications, if we’re going to be honest, and while it may be possible to use in a darkened corner of the room with the curtains drawn, it definitely won’t be the best in terms of daytime viewing. Other details include a single 5-watt speaker for sound, Bluetooth 5.0 and a remote control and companion mobile app that allows the device to be paired with a smartphone. Deepseek AI features are also onboard, as well as 1GB of RAM and 32 GB of storage.
What is cool though is the gimbal stand, which can swivel by 160 degrees over the vertical, meaning it can project images onto a wall or the ceiling, depending on the viewer’s mood. It has tons of features baked in that aim to simplify setup, such as autofocus, keystone correction, image resizing for obstacle avoidance and fit-to-screen capabilities. There are HDMI ports on the back, and Wi-Fi 6 is onboard.
Where it really stands out is with its two unique features. The AI-powered gesture controls enable simpler navigation through the menus, and there’s a special pen-like stylus device that can be used to tap the screen, play games and draw on the projected images. Clearly, the Honor Choice is taking its inspiration from a much older projector called the Touchjet Pond, which debuted 10 years ago and came with a pair of stylus-like sticks that were tracked by the device, enabling users to play simple games.
However, we imagine that as one happily starts doodling away on the wall using whatever creativity apps they can find, it won’t be long until they realize the limitations of this capability. It seems to us that users will almost inevitably have to position themselves somewhere between the projector and the wall, and that means they’ll likely end up casting shadows of themselves onto the surface and blocking out parts of the image. It’s a shame that Honor didn’t decide to build an ultra-short-throw projector instead – although such a solution would almost certainly be quite a bit more expensive.
That brings us to the other main selling point of this model – it’s really very cheap, with a pre-order price listing of just 499 RMB, which translates to around £52.99 at the current exchange rate. It’ll start shipping in China soon, but there’s no word on if or when it’ll arrive in the U.K. or elsewhere.
