XGIMI MoGo 3 Pro

Design & stand

The MoGo 3 Pro is a 204.9 mm tall cylinder, 95 mm across, weighing 1.1 kg — near enough the footprint of a large takeaway coffee. The lower section rotates against the upper through 130 degrees, which means the projector is its own tripod. Tilt it up at the ceiling, tilt it down at a wall, set it on a shelf pointing across a room; you never need a stand to get a sensible angle, and that removes the single most tedious part of using a small projector.

There is a fabric lanyard with an orange XGIMI toggle on the side, which sounds like a styling detail and turns out to be the thing you actually grab. The finish is a warm off-white aluminium rather than the usual black plastic, so it does not look out of place in a living room.

The battery question

This is the part of the spec sheet that deserves reading twice. XGIMI markets the MoGo 3 Pro as a portable outdoor projector, and it is genuinely portable in the sense that it weighs 1.1 kg and fits in a bag. It does not have an internal battery. Power comes in over USB-C at 65W — from the mains adapter, or from a USB-C PD 3.0 power bank capable of delivering 65W.

Two consequences. First, a 65W PD power bank is not the cheap kind — if you do not already own one, add it to the price. Second, XGIMI sells a PowerBase Stand that supplies power and acts as a base, which is why the listing shows two prices: $379 for the projector alone and $439 with the stand. If you intend to use this away from sockets, the $439 configuration is the honest price of the product, not an upsell you can wave away.

Compared against genuinely battery-equipped rivals, factor that in before concluding the MoGo is the cheaper option. Compared against projectors that live on a shelf and never move, the missing battery costs you nothing at all.

Image & brightness

Native 1920 × 1080 from a 0.23-inch DMD, driven by an LED light source rated at 25,000 hours, throwing 40 to 200 inches at a 1.2:1 ratio. XGIMI recommends 60 to 120 inches and that recommendation is honest: 450 ISO lumens spread over 200 inches is not a watchable picture.

Where it does well is colour. DCI-P3 90% coverage plus HDR10 support gives you saturation and tonality that embarrass most sub-$500 projectors, and because the light source is LED rather than a lamp, there is no warm-up, no colour drift over the years and no bulb to replace. At 60 to 80 inches in a dark room the picture is genuinely good rather than merely acceptable.

In a room with daylight or lamps on, it is the opposite story. 450 ISO lumens is a dark-room specification and no amount of good colour science changes that. If you want to watch sport on a Saturday afternoon, this is the wrong product category, not just the wrong model.

• Throw ratio 1.2:1 — roughly 2.2 m of distance for a 100-inch image.
• Noise under 32 dB at 1 m, quiet enough that the speakers cover it easily.
• Eye protection can be turned on or off, which parents will care about more than reviewers do.

Google TV & Netflix

This is why the MoGo 3 Pro is worth its price. It runs full Google TV with a licensed Netflix application. That sentence looks unremarkable until you have owned a cheap projector: the entire budget category is littered with devices that cannot run Netflix at all, or run it at 480p through a sideloaded phone app, or require you to cast from another device and lose the remote. XGIMI paid for the certification, and it changes daily use completely.

Everything else follows from having a real platform: the Play Store, 10,000-plus apps, 800-plus free channels, Google Assistant, Chromecast built in, and a Bluetooth remote that controls the projector rather than a phone app pretending to. Software updates arrive the way they do on a television.

Sound

Two 5W drivers tuned by Harman Kardon, with Dolby Audio decoding. Ten watts total from a body this size will not give you bass, and nothing in this review will pretend otherwise. What it does give you is clean, intelligible dialogue at a sensible volume and a stereo image wide enough that you are not immediately reaching for a soundbar — which, for a projector you carry between rooms, is the point.

There is also an ambient light mode that turns the unit into a speaker with a soft glow, using Bluetooth 5.1 as an audio input. It is a gimmick that people actually use.

Ports & gaming

USB-C carrying PD 3.0 at 65W for power, a standard USB-A port, and Micro HDMI with ARC. The Micro HDMI is the one genuine design annoyance: plugging in a console, a laptop or a Blu-ray player means a Micro HDMI cable or an adapter, and XGIMI's own specification notes that HDR10 is not supported through that input. So the HDR you paid for applies to streaming, not to the box you plug in.

For gaming, the numbers are respectable for the class: game mode measures about 27 ms at 1080p60 with auto keystone off, rising to around 60 ms with it on. Turn auto keystone off once the image is squared and you have a projector that is fine for anything short of competitive shooters.