The Latte pours a 720p image with 300 lumens of LED light, making it one of the beefier pocket projectors out there. It will also connect wirelessly to a smartphone (opens in new tab) or HDMI device. It also has an integrated 10W Harman Kardon-tuned speaker, so you can listen to music if you don’t want to dive straight into movies or TV. However, the battery is a little disappointing: you’ll get three hours of projector use from a 6,000mAh battery, meaning you would have to watch Netflix (opens in new tab)’s The Irishman in two sittings. Still, it’s portable cinema power, and a battery pack might be able to help keep it topped up. There’s definitely a use-case for this, whether you want to take a projector on work trips or holidays, or perhaps you just have a tiny apartment with no space whatsoever. The Latte’s short throw lens means a 40-inch image from one meter and an 120-inch image at three meters. It’s rather a shame that Asus has made a lot of odd claims in its press release. Firstly, the press release says that the speaker is mug-shaped, which it… we guess it’s mug-sized? But we’ve not got any coffee cups that look like that. There’s a video below where they really lean hard into the coffee cup motif, begging the question: why is this gray and not latte colored? We’re happy to let that slide, but Asus also claims that it’s the first projector with a fabric exterior, which is only kind of true. The MiSmart Compact Projector (opens in new tab) already exists and has a fabric front, but it doesn’t cover the whole device. We’re really scraping the barrel of world firsts if this is what companies are making the big claims about these days. Regardless, this could turn out to be an exciting release. The Asus Zenbeam Latte is planned to release in May this year, and if the price point is right it could pick up plenty of fans. We’ll let you know as soon as we get to play with one.
