The Pocket Radar is a cellphone-sized doppler radar which promises to revolutionize the measuring of speeds. If by “revolutionize” you mean “make smaller”.

The obvious use case for a tiny, battery powered “radar-gun” is for cops to catch speeding motorists, only without the bulky handset. But the Pocket Radar publicity pitch also suggests taking it to the car races, or bike races, or, well, anything races. You can even use it to measure the speed of a baseball pitch. A pair of AAA batteries will power the device for up to 10,000 readings, and those readings are accurate to plus or minus one mile per hour.

I’m having some trouble working out why you’d want one, though, unless you were a really hardcore sports fan. The concept is undoubtedly very intriguing, and if the price is right at the Pocket Radar’s spring 2010 launch, this could be a must-have add-on for many enthusiast hacking projects, rigging one up outside your home for example, to read-out passing driver’s speeds on a big LED screen and shaming them into slowing down. Like the Roomba before it, the Pocket Radar could become a maker’s favorite. So do us a favor, Pocket Radar folks: make this easy to hook up to a computer, and give us some open software.

Product page [Pocket Radar]
Press release [BusinessWire]