Pacific Media Associates (PMA) has released its 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 PMA’s 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 PMA’s 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 percent range. Our 2009 End User Survey showed only 44 percent of organizational respondents and 53 percent 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 percent of all survey respondents routinely carry cellphones with them (more than half of these are smartphones). 45 percent of them carry notebook or netbook PCs. And 10 percent 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.”