I tried the next-gen version of the best budget portable projector, and it’s an amazing all-rounder that should have Samsung worried

When we wrote our XGIMI MoGo 3 Pro review, which led to it being crowned as our favorite budget option among the best portable projectors, we noted three flaws: it didn't have a built-in battery, the speakers were weak, and it couldn't hold up well in bright conditions.

The last of these isn't unique to the MoGo series, and you have to pay a lot more for brightness that can stand up to sunlight, so that's fair enough.

The other two, however, are solvable problems – and in the MoGo 4, XGIMI has not only fixed them, it's made a better, tighter portable projector all around, based on my time with it so far.

This is far from a full review, but the improvements to the MoGo 4 were obvious to see just from my early time testing it. This is such an impressive portable entertainment device for its $499 / £509 / AU$1,299 price.

I pulled the MoGo 4 out of its box at home, and because of its new built-in battery, it was up and running within a handful of seconds, pointing at a convenient white wall. The design is actually even slicker than the last version, but still with the same smart 'fold-away' cylinder shape that protects the lens when you're not using it – and this is all despite adding the battery.

XGIMI says the battery should last for about 2.5 hours, and I haven't put this fully to the test yet (obviously, we'll check for our full review), but one thing I noted immediately is that being on battery power doesn't diminish the performance.

Sometimes with high-power devices that switch to batteries, you see some slow-down in the smart TV software or in other areas – but one of the elements that impressed me early here is how slick its Google TV integration is.

It responds instantly to every button press on the remote, so scrolling around is completely frustration-free – and there are some expensive options among the best TVs that I can't say that about.

During setup, the automatic keystone correction and focus didn't seem to kick in right away. Instead I had to hit the focus button on the remote early on to make the setup screens look clear, and the keystone fixing started working suddenly when I got to a certain point in the process.

After that, the keystone correction activated every time I moved the projector – even if I just wobbled it a bit too much. This again worked incredibly quickly – in under a second each time, it had a stable new picture.

The other element I noticed during this time, even before getting anything playing on it, was that the sound seemed to be massively improved. And once I fired up some movie images, it was clear that this is the case – the MoGo 4 sounds ridiculously good for speakers built into a small projector frame.

I tested the MoGo 4 in my spare room, where I have a TV with a Sonos Ray soundbar set up – my partner was confused about the type of projector it was, because she was convinced I must have connected it to the Sonos Ray given the sound she was hearing from downstairs.

The sound is full, it's wide, it's bass rich, and dialogue remains clear. Obviously, it still has the potential problem that if it's behind you, it'll sound behind you – but I had it in front and to the side of me, and I felt like I was getting a satisfying movie experience just by taking this thing out of its box, pointing it at the wall, and firing something up. No extra equipment, not a single cable involved.

The picture quality itself is very similar to the MoGo 3 Pro, and capable of producing really rich colors, good detail (though this is an HD projector, not 4K), and enough brightness to be clearly watchable even with a decent amount of ambient light – I had a (not particularly bright, but still normal) light on in the room, and it was perfectly watchable overall.

As you'd expect, dark tones are the problem, especially when projected onto a wall instead of a screen that can help with it. With ambient light, it's not really capable of anything you'd call 'black' – in the image below, the jellyfish is supposed to be on a black background, not a see-through one – but I don't hold this against it, because it's a problem with all portable projectors.

Watching brighter scenes, I was totally pulled in by the combination of the solid colors and rich sound, on a 65-inch-ish screen that I'd just instantly thrown up from about six feet away.

Given the quality of the viewing experience, and the convenience of the battery-packing design and elements such as having a full-size HDMI port, and a mini-remote that's attached to it (so you can leave the regular Google TV remote at home), I think this looks like a real winner for the price.

There is a more expensive laser version coming too, which is about 25% brighter, and that XGIMI says it's the most compact laser projector to date. I'm looking forward to seeing what that can do.

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