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Technology

Wireless Monitors? 300

Posted by CmdrTaco from the step-in-the-right-direction dept.
antiopus writes "I didn't think it was possible anytime soon due to bandwidth considerations, but ViewSonic has announced a wireless monitor. At only 10 inches and 800x600, I don't know if it'll be replacing my CRT anytime soon, but I can certainly foresee some interesting applications for wearable/portable computing."
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Wireless Monitors? More

Wireless Monitors?

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  • One less cable,....well in about 5 more years when something realistic comes out and I buy it.

  • This isn't a wireless monitor (Score:5, Informative)

    by Hulver ( 5850 ) on Tuesday April 09, 2002 @12:17PM (#3310102) Homepage
    It's a MS tablet PC, running WinCE. Looking at the site will show you that.

    Sheesh.

    • True, but they seem to finally be able to display apps remotely on another screen in Windows* so I guess that's another monitor? This is actually kinda cool, it's like a monitor you can do a little more with...
    • But Viewsonic is marketing this as a "Wireless Monitor", even if it is just a tablet PC doing some remote access.
      • In fact, the term "wireless monitor" describes exactly how little functionality this device offers. For some amazingly stupid reason, they've castrated WinCE to the point that all it can do is terminal services.

        Why not just call it a "large format PDA", and fix it up with all the little native apps that small PDAs have, including it's own web browser (that can connect through your desktop or router), as well as an RDP client. Then you can get some additional use from it on the road without having an arbitrary "wireless tether" to your desktop pc.

        • Cause no one's going to spend $900 on a "large format PDA"? Seriously, it's all in how you market your product.
          • They already have a "large format PDA" in the form of the ViewPad 100. I think it is similar to this device, just with a complete WinCE? We have some here where I work, along with some of the ViewPad 1000s, which are tablet form PCs. They are hella cool for just web browsing, and the 1000s have a built in camera for NetMeeting and such.
      • Yeah, but it proves that the editor did not even take the time to read the first paragraph. If he did, he would have added a note on.
    • Seems Mr. AntiOpurt doesn't even bother to read the articles before submitting. That's certainly a one-up on the editors who don't bother to check or posters who don't read either.

      A wireless LCD monitor would certainly be welcome, but wireless keyboard and a Gyration Gyromouse are a bit more of a priority, as they're input devices which means you pretty much have to .aha. tangle .aha. with them.

      Any good recommendations on a real quality wireless keyboard are welcome.

    • Tablet PCs run Windows XP. The AirPanel is a large PDA running the terminal server client.
    • It's a MS tablet PC, running WinCE. Looking at the site will show you that.

      Correct. However, it has built in remote access software (Citrix ICA, Microsoft RDP) and it's being marketed as a wireless monitor. Just take a look at the title of the page: "airpanel 100 Wireless Monitor".
    • From the specs:

      Video Resolution/Built-in LCD Display
      800 x 600 in landscape mode
      600 x 800 in portrait mode



      Duh.

  • ..piece of crap.

    Note from the article that the "10 inches" applies to the maximum range of the wirelessness. I guess it'll keep wire clutter off the desk. No other real use. Except maybe a sensitive Tempest monitor.

  • Good... (Score:3, Funny)

    by Meefan ( 526525 ) on Tuesday April 09, 2002 @12:18PM (#3310113) Homepage

    Now I can pump even MORE radiation into my brain. My cell phone, pager, laptop, computer, wireless mouse/keyboard and CB radio aren't enough... Must... have... cancer...

    Dave
  • .. attach to the laptop to your OBD-2 compliant car - and away you go :)

  • Not wireless VGA (Score:1, Redundant)

    by ryanr ( 30917 )
    It's a WinCE tablet running Terminal Server client.
  • It's not a wireless monitor, it's a WinCE tablet. You can use it as the WinXP equivalent of an X terminal, apparently.
  • 206mhz strong arm 128MB ram 32MB flash looks doable, sure would beat winCE.net But might be price prohibitive.
  • Knowing Slashdot... I restrained myself from totally flipping out, after ACTUALLY READING the page, it's just a badly named WinCE Tablet PC. Is it even possible to make a true wireless monitor? I'd think you'd need a whole new type of video card for that. Any thought?
    • If you want a dongle that plugs in to your video port and gives 800x600x60Hz video at 16 bits, that works out to 460 Mbits of bandwidth. So "Wireless Video" is somethere around "Wireless Gigabit Ethernet" in terms of feasibility. I don't even know if the FCC has a big enough chunk of bandwidth left that it hasn't sold.
      • "If you want a dongle that plugs in to your video port and gives 800x600x60Hz video at 16 bits, that works out to 460 Mbits of bandwidth"

        They could easily get that down to a few megabits if they used a variant of MPEG2 or MPEG4. The downside is that real time encoding'd be a bitch, it'd require special hardware to do that.

        Feasibly, though, somebody could do it. It'd be a little expensive, but I bet with an 802.11 card it'd be possible to xmit a stream of MPEG data wirelessly and decode it fast enough for it to be usable remotely.

        • The problem with encoding to MPEG2 or MPEG4 is that there's a time lag; the video will never be less than 1/2 second behind, as it has to be encoded in 15 frame chunks (IBBPBBPBBPBBPBB). Take digital satellite TV for example; if you are fortunate enough to have local channels via satellite, put two TV's side-by-side: one using normal broadcast signals, the other attached to your DSS. There will be a 3-4 second delay on the DSS on average.
          • The simple solution to that is to use all I-frames and take the extra hit in bandwidth. It's still far better than uncompressed video.

            Are the b's there indicating bi-directional frames? Didn't realize those were being used on a broadcast medium. Is that to deal with the problem of noise causing bit errors, you think?

            P.S. I apologize for misspelling 'bandwidth' heh
  • You still got to plug it in, right?
  • Won't the MPAA be banning this technology soon enough? Pretty soon, you'll be able to transmit your HDTV feeds and such to all of the neighbors and share cable/satellite bills.

  • Just love that marketing-speak (Score:4, Funny)

    by sacremon ( 244448 ) on Tuesday April 09, 2002 @12:27PM (#3310202)
    Under 'Liberate yourself from your desktop'

    "Establish a one-to-one relationship with your PC."

    Sorry, I prefer to be a slut and have relationships with lots of PCs.
    • Yeah, so I'm going to establish a 1-1 relationship with my desktop PC by leaving my desk and accessing my desktop pc at crappy color depth over a low bandwidth network link using terminal server protocols and avoiding video and highly graphical apps?

      Okay. Go bankrupt. See what I care.

      So, anyway... This bucket of marketing droid spew makes me realise what I most hate about Macs [and now for something completely different] -- It's not really Macs (the kludgey pre-X OS has been mostly replaced, and the hardware isn't so overpriced anymore,) it's just Apple, and its "Reality Distortion Field(TM)" (as the Register calls it)...

      Apple goes for really odd technical promotional ploys, like trying to hype the insignificantly (~10%-20%) better performance of their IO interconnect bus over PCland's northbridge/southbridge designs, when their processor bus (single clocked 133mhz) is so slow that they can't even go to DDR SDRAM, because they've already hit the bus bottleneck. (Compare with Athlon's double-pumped 133mhz bus, and Pentium 4's quad-pumped 133mhz bus.) Watch them try to promote their new G4 systems with DDR SDRAM L3 caches but half-speed PC133 ram against systems where the entire main memory is DDR SDRAM; see them try to sneak the "Well, their processors don't have L3 caches, so our platform must be faster." assertion under the radar. It's hilarious!

      I'll avoid commenting on their facist intellectual property policy or their monopolistic microsoftian product tying practices. (Oops... Well, I can't take those adjectives back now...)

      Anyway, this wouldn't really bother me so much if trade press hacks and clueless consumers didn't so often say that Apple was the most consumer-friendly thing since sliced bread all the time. User friendly? Sure. Consumer friendly? Caveat emptor.

  • Mine is 2.5 lbs, has an integrated keyboard, mouse, soundcard, camera and hard drive.
    It runs Linux and has a wireless network card.
    (It's my 2 year old Sony vaio...)

    Cheers,
    Jim in Tokyo
  • But having heard about project 'Mira' it's using 802.11b and the virst versions are meant to be an adjunct to your existing monitor. (dual headed solution)

    In OEM quantity, adding the WinCE/wifi/battery only adds about $200 to the price of an LCD monitor anyway.

    What's funny is, now that I've got WiFi, I'm using a laptop to do a VERY similar thing (remote control the home office computer from the kitchen) with the added benefit of having a second computer if da wife wants to surf the web while I want to do something. (AND having a real entry system...typing www.blah.com or fritz@wherever.org with any non keyboard entry system is kinda tough)

    Further, With the laptop remoteing in, I have access to my email early on Sunday morning without waking up the parrots (they're in the home office) which would then wake up Wifey, makeing her cranky - and by extension - ME cranky.

    In short, a good technology evolution, but it probably won't replace your monitor if you want fast games or full screen video (11 mbps is a pretty tiney pipe to run a DVD thru.)
    • You know what might just be extra cool? Create an LCD monitor, much like MIRA; it's actually an RDP/X/VNC/Whatever thin client + the hardware. On the back, along the edges, and oriented properly, put the two halves of the keyboard. So, you're holding it two handed, by the edges, and you can type type type away. Put a pencil-eraser 'nubby' mouse on the bottom of one side, beside or amoung the keys, the space key and mouse buttons on the front, for a thumb, and off you go. :-)

  • Wireless Monitor? (Score:2, Informative)

    by mgrochmal ( 567074 )
    After reading the web page, it looks like it wants to be several things at once.

    Wirelessly access files, applications and/or data...New Windows CE .NET operating system from Microsoft And a touch display panel.

    It's not so much a wireless monitor but a PC-integrated PDA. It runs Remote Desktop via 802.11b to your PC and uses a stylus to manipulate data on the monitor. Besides, how many monitors use PCMCIA cards? Also judging from the hardware inside (206 MHz, 128 meg SDram, 2Mb video card), it gives an impression of a 13" wide iPaq. If given the choice, I would stick with a notebook. Sure it's heavier than the 2+ lbs. monitor, but more current generations of laptops can handle much more than this monitor. If you really wanted to buy this for the desktop broadcasting, add an 802.11b and run your favorite remote desktop.

  • Wireless Monitor? Not happening... (Score:5, Informative)

    by jgore26785 ( 460027 ) on Tuesday April 09, 2002 @12:29PM (#3310243)
    I work in the RF industry as a software engineer... I'm by no means an RF engineer, but I have to comment.

    First of all, this is not a wireless monitor. It is a portable PC that communicates with other PCs via a network card. The video signal is NOT sent over the air.

    The bandwidth requirements for a wireless monitor are impractical. It's certainly possible, but the amount of RF bandwidth and/or power required to do it would either kill you, cook your intestines or give you a nice bout of cancer, depending on how you implement it.

    Just a quick estimation (please don't criticize this, I have other work to do):

    800 x 600 = 480,000 pixels
    480 pixels x 16-bit = 7.68 Mb = 960 kB
    960 kB x 60 Hz = 57.6 MB / s!

    Given that 802.11b provides 11 Mb as a MAXIMUM (yes, that's bits, which translates to 1.4 MB / s), we'd only have about 1/50th the bandwidth necessary. And that doesn't account for automatic rate switching, interference, and other nodes on the network.

      • Caching is important here...except for playing video's, your computermonitor is 99% the same as it was 1/50th of a second before that.


        Just look at RDP over IP, works fine, even over a 56Kb modem connection.

        • Exactly. Differencing (as used in VNC and RDP) is a form of interframe compression. I'm glad you got my point since the other two replies didn't.
      • The bandwidth requirements for a wireless monitor are impractical.
      So, you're telling me "TV" is impractical? TV is bearly more than 640x480x24(?) but there are dozens of devices to transmit analog video around. And none of them "kill you, cook your intestines or give you a nice bout of cancer". (at least, not immediately.)

      You have failed to make any distinction between the digital world of the computer and the analog world of RF radio. For example, a T3 is transmitted within 6MHz of analog space -- that's one cable TV channel, btw.

      AND, you are assuming every pixel on the screen is changing 60 times per second. That's rarely true. And at any rate, it's far more efficient to send the function calls that are drawing the pixels instead of all half million pixels over and over again.

      • So, you're telling me "TV" is impractical? TV is bearly more than 640x480x24(?) but there are dozens of devices to transmit analog video around. And none of them "kill you, cook your intestines or give you a nice bout of cancer". (at least, not immediately.)

        You have failed to make any distinction between the digital world of the computer and the analog world of RF radio. For example, a T3 is transmitted within 6MHz of analog space -- that's one cable TV channel, btw.

        AND, you are assuming every pixel on the screen is changing 60 times per second. That's rarely true. And at any rate, it's far more efficient to send the function calls that are drawing the pixels instead of all half million pixels over and over again.


        Actually, TV is more along 300 lines I think. Not to mention it's analog.. you may wonder what the difference is, but the fact is that going from analog to digital requires at least 10x more bandwidth. It's simply because analog is much more noise-tolerant... your signal may be affected, but it doesn't result in catastrophic loss as it does in digital systems.

        So fine, lets do the HDTV comparison. Unfortunately, I don't know enough about HDTV to know what the exact bandwidth numbers are. But if you want to put a multi-million powerful antenna in your house and pay the monstrous power bill to be able to use a wireless monitor, more power to you. Granted, you don't need the range, but you certainly need the same amount of bandwidth as an HDTV station. Not to mention your best resoultion would be (about?) 1080 x 600.

        To address the compression concerns, you can use MPEG2 compression on "lifelike" pictures with little noticeable loss in quality, especially on regular definition TVs. Don't think for a second that applies to word processing where per-pixel resolution is practically a requirement.

        So fine, lets make a compression scheme that is good on static scenes. What happens then when you want to play a 3D game?
        • Actually, TV is more along 300 lines I think.

          720x240 at 60 Hz, interlaced to give you 720x480 at 30 Hz, if I remember correctly. Some of the rows/columns aren't visible, though.

          Just as a data point, since the exact values aren't terribly relevant :).

          Not to mention it's analog.. you may wonder what the difference is, but the fact is that going from analog to digital requires at least 10x more bandwidth. It's simply because analog is much more noise-tolerant... your signal may be affected, but it doesn't result in catastrophic loss as it does in digital systems.

          It turns out that this isn't quite correct, for a couple of reasons.

          Firstly, there's no reason to transmit the display signal digitally. We've all been using analog CRTs for years without a problem; digital is only required within the computer, where we want to be able to manipulate data without loss. Lossiness on the final output stage is tolerable.

          Secondly, it turns out that you can transmit digital signals much more densely than you estimate. A factor of 10 is what I'd expect for one bit per sample plus a little bit of error correction. You can actually get much, much more than this (a 56k modem gets around 4-6 bits per sample, if memory serves). More aggressive error correction codes let you correct for a surprising amount of noise, too.

          In short, I think you could do it with only about a factor of 2 bandwidth increase, especially over short range under controllable conditions.

          Lastly, you have a vast amount of bandwidth available. If there's enough airspace to transmit 60+ channels of television at relatively low frequencies, finding a window for monitors shouldn't be an unsolvable problem.
          • 720x240 at 60 Hz, interlaced to give you 720x480 at 30 Hz, if I remember correctly. Some of the rows/columns aren't visible, though

            720x480 is the way a computer sees TV resolution. TV uses rectangular pixels, computers use square pixels. That's why it's usual to specify TV resolution in lines.

            For example, a VHS tape on standard play has about 300 lines of resolution. A new Sony Wega might have 500 lines of resolution. A DV camcorder might record 500 lines of resolution.

      • Yes, but then if you're drawing vector graphics on a monitor, its no longer a monitor.

        First off, that is what this Viewsonic device is effectively doing, via a limited OS.
        Secondly, analog TV has nowhere near the resolution of a 1024x768 computer monitor. Ever seen super-sharp 1/8" tall letters on your tv? No? oh, right, because its only got 300-odd scan lines. WIth the current generation of technology, wireless monitors are totally impractical. Besies, considering the cost of building a super-high-bandwidth limited range RF transciever vs the cost of a 25-pin cable, it'll almost never fly. Small, wireless tablet-pc's OTOH are kinda cool though... just expensive. Finally, the whole "assuming every pixel changes 60 times per seond thing" doesn't work. Lets say you're in windows/linux with gnome, doing work processing, so, lets say 1/100'th of your pixels change every second on average. Thats fine with good compression, and when you have a whole screen refresh it'll take a bit longer. But then you can't do games like quake, where everything changes every second. Remember, averages don't work in reality.
      • You have failed to make any distinction between the digital world of the computer and the analog world of RF radio. For example, a T3 is transmitted within 6MHz of analog space -- that's one cable TV channel, btw.

        Please enlighten us. One Cable TV Channel, running 60, 30 frame/s? What resolution would you give the best Cable TV, anything like 800x600? I'm sure it requires a bit more than 6 MHz for a steady stream of 'worst case' frame to frame. His math is crude, but it's hardly worth dwelling on. You'd still like some kind of scrambling so the neighbors and spooks can't track what you're doing, right?

        Power of a transmitter could be very low, but you'd want to be sure your OC'd CPU doesn't leak noise from your modded PC case and interfer, so a bit of extra power might be called for. When it comes down to it, you should probably be running at least in the GHz range. Maybe at that power and frequency you could nuke some houseflies...

    • What is the "RF Industry" anyway?

      I have cable internet, but not cable TV..
      My parents have satellite TV, I have an antenna.
      Both my folks and I get our video signals over the air, and none of us have cancer or cooked intestines.. So I'm sceptical of your scepticism.

      Further, I work in the "Power Generation Industry" as a software engineer.. And even though to do my job I need to know nothing about power generation itself, I'll tell you for a fact that electricity can also be transmitted over the air. If done properly, it's even quite harmless.

      That said, this is just a web-tablet running something like VNC or Terminal Server. So, while this is not sending video over the air, it serves as though it did. So what's the difference?

      As for the plausibility of transmitting video signals wirelessly.. Well, been to Radio Shack lately? How about the X-10 wireless video camera website?
    • "The bandwidth requirements for a wireless monitor are impractical. It's certainly possible, but the amount of RF bandwidth and/or power required to do it would either kill you, cook your intestines or give you a nice bout of cancer, depending on how you implement it."
      But couldn't it be done reasonably over short distances? I have a little radioshack video relay thing which sends a few hundred feet, reasonably well No cooked intestines or cancer yet.

      You'd think that if you kept the distances small, you could get fairly high quality wireless monitors, with low RF emissions. (I'm mainly interested in a couple of feet, from the PC to the monitor, not hundreds of feet.)
    • Agreed. It appears they've simply come up with another name for marketing a stripped down network pc.
    • >>It's certainly possible, but the amount of RF
      >>bandwidth and/or power required to do it would >>either kill you, cook your intestines or give
      >>you a nice bout of cancer, depending on how you
      >>implement it.

      Ummmmmmm. ok - i'll bite.......

      then how is DirectTV beaming 200 channels completely across north america without frying the entire population.....? How are the reglar TV stations in my area transmitting dozens of channels without killing me.

      And i'd guess the power requirements for a 'wireless monitor' with a range of 50-100 feet would be a LOT less than a satellite 23,000 miles away (!) that has to deal with the atmosphere, rain fade, etc etc etc.

      I know that this thing isn't a *real* wireless monitor (good job editors), but I have to question the statement that a real one would kill me when there are tons of RF transmissions around me every second pumping thru even more bandwidth.
    • 960 kB x 60 Hz = 57.6 MB / s!
      And that doesn't account for automatic rate switching, interference, and other nodes on the network.

      And most of all, it doesn't account for the fact that PC Anywhere and others have already been doing it for years with less than 56K.

    • The bandwidth requirements for a wireless monitor are impractical. It's certainly possible, but the amount of RF bandwidth and/or power required to do it would either kill you, cook your intestines or give you a nice bout of cancer, depending on how you implement it.

      I certainly hope this isn't true. If it is, I'll have to throw out my TV and rabbit ears!
    • The bandwidth requirements for a wireless monitor are impractical. It's certainly possible, but the amount of RF bandwidth and/or power required to do it would either kill you, cook your intestines or give you a nice bout of cancer, depending on how you implement it. Just a quick estimation (please don't criticize this, I have other work to do): 800 x 600 = 480,000 pixels 480 pixels x 16-bit = 7.68 Mb = 960 kB 960 kB x 60 Hz = 57.6 MB / s!

      I'll readily admit I'm an idiot in the RF arena, but I have a question. What about the 2.4GHz wireless transmitters that can send the signal from a TV to another TV/monitor? Surely they're not using that kind of bandwidth, are they? How is it done?

      Not to mention the fact that TV's are fed by antennas. Is each channel taking up the equivalent bandwidth?

  • I always find myself needed a wireless monitor (Score:4, Insightful)

    by automatic_jack ( 181074 ) on Tuesday April 09, 2002 @12:35PM (#3310275) Homepage
    I'm an MIS Manager at a small company, and I very often find myself wishing that I had a portable wireless monitor. We run a lot of machines headless, and when they have problems, dragging a monitor over to them can be a real pain. What if all I had to do was get within range, turn on my display, and diagnose the problem? Man, that'd be sweet.
  • Honestly, I'm far more interested in using Viewsonic's ViewPad -- they're billing it as a "super-PDA," but it's really just a nice tablet computer. 10" TFT screen, built in 802.11, and onboard storage.

    Anyone tried getting Linux running on one of these yet? I'd love it for my house, but I'm not about to drop the 1100 dollars of the lowest price on Pricewatch just to try and get it running, and I don't know of any decent X servers for WinCE.

    --saint
  • ...enormous. What more is there to say?

  • Sounds like an Audrey to me. (Score:4, Interesting)

    by cisco_rob ( 443705 ) <robshort@NOSPAm.venturenet.net> on Tuesday April 09, 2002 @12:44PM (#3310344) Homepage
    Sheesh - just get one of these [audreyhacking.com] and a wireless card. Save yourself $100's. ..plus it runs Linux, use it as a wireless remote, mp3 player, etc..
  • I can do that with an 802.11 card and a remote desktop client running on a slim tablet, terminal, laptop or whatever.
  • well I knew about msnbc - and now this thing can run ms ce.net - not so sure I would want this. I mean cnet was boring enough, now they want me to carry it around with me? just because MS and cnet merged doent mean their programming will get any more entertaining.
  • SIMEDA Gmbh [simeda.com] has a VNC viewer for the new Java-enabled phones (e.g. all new models from Nokia coming out this spring) [simeda.com] and PDAs. True, not very speedy (goes over GPRS), but more "wireless" than something that needs to be within a few meters of the desktop computer. And at least VNC is open, so you can connect to Unix, Windows, Mac, whatever. All that from your cell phone.
  • Take a look here [fordvehicles.com], Ford just announced that the latest line of the Ford Focus will be a wireless car! Yes, that's right you'll be able to take the car anywhere you want without having to worry about those annoying connector cables.

    Where's the /. story on this one?

  • Someday, I'll have... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by mblase ( 200735 ) on Tuesday April 09, 2002 @12:49PM (#3310394)

    ...of course, in a house where we can't even keep the cordless phone on its recharger for more than five minutes and stash the remote control in a new location every day, this will probably be less of a boon than some people think.

  • Why is having a wireless monitor so hard to fathom? I'm watching a wireless "monitor" now in fact. Its called my television. Seems to get channels fine from "thin" air. These images are transmitted by a remote "base station".... they even have a high resolution model available in some places. I think that we have the tech but its not being looked at correctly. Just my thoughts.
  • ...are all very well. But what I'm waiting for is wireless power. I don't need to put my Palm in its cradle to sync it now - but I still need to recharge it in the cradle. I can only last 4 hours on the batteries I have for my laptop. When someone finds a way to distribute power wirelessly then come back and tell me you've found something interesting.


    There are already a few devices that can be powered by RF - eg. security and ID tags. How long before we can run our PDAs this way?

  • I saw this, and my first thought is it is perfect for the piano. It has audio already, so just plug in a mic and download some sheet music. With good software it should be able to tell where I am and automaticly turn pages. Put some speakers nearyby, and I can learn to play by ear from some tune, and after I give up on some hard section let the software give me sheet music for just that section. And it gives me a comptuer in the living room where I don't want a real one, but once in a while want to use one.

    Note that piano software isn't exactly easy to write. Beginners make mistakes, while experts improvise, so it needs to allow very loose interpitations of where you are. Figguring out what notes are being played is also doable, but not easy. Probably more complex than a strongArm can do, but that is okay, I got a fast comptuer in the office to offload the hard work onto, just compress the audio and process it elsewhere)

    Now if the cost is just reasonable

    • Perhaps you could use a webcam to detect where your looking, or some subtle face expression.
      I can see a day where these are built into pianos(not "high end ones" but certianly home pianos).

  • Yeah, that's a good idea (Score:3, Funny)

    by gouldtj ( 21635 ) on Tuesday April 09, 2002 @01:07PM (#3310513) Homepage Journal
    All I need to have is a few of these on my desk: "Damn it! Where did I put that desktop!?!?!?"
  • I see that it includes Media Player and Internet Explorer as well as remote desktop software. If it can combine the two intelligently, it would make a killer combination. "Big heavy" MS apps like Word/Excel/Outlook can run on a "server" machine, and as they don't have rapidly changing complex content so can probably be passed relatively efficiently over Wireless LAN. Multimedia content *might* run locally on the webpad - passed compressed over the network and only decompressed after this bottleneck. If this were the case, it would (just) be possible to watch DVD quality video over a wireless connection!

    What this needs is a clever custom interface so that apps execute on the server machine, apart from proxies for Media Player and IE which invoke the real apps on the "monitor". Of course, the same thing would (in theory) be possible with an X-based solution - has anyone done such a thing?
  • Looks to me like more of a WinCE handheld, but a really large one at that. Maybe we've embarked on the armhelds?

    How long til someone gets linux running on this I can VNC into everything I own?
  • No more tempest [erikyyy.de] vans running around outside your house. Just a guy with a wireless modem, sniffing your wireless network [remote-exploit.org] and sending keystrokes via your wireless keyboard and mouse.


    Entrapment could be ever so easy: Look! He went to a child porno site!


    Wasn't that you sitting outside my house breaking and entering my computer?

  • plus it has wires... (Score:2, Interesting)

    by nubbie ( 454788 )
    it still needs to be plugged in, in order for it to get power... dosn't that sort of defeat the wireless part of it...
  • This is the revival of a product released over 8 years ago, the Wyse Winterm 2930 [wyse.com]: a DOS/Pen based wireless Citrix winterm.

    There was no RDP support of course because it hadn't even been envisioned by Microsoft at the time - in fact, Microsoft was having tremendous legal headaches involving software licensing on Citrix's special "multiple simeotaneous user" versions of Windows NT 3.1 and later 3.5. This culminated in the establishment of MS's internal "Hydra" project and the creation of Windows NT 4.0 Terminal Services Edition and the later integration of this "Terminal Services" software into as much as possible all the way down into the Windows XP Home edition.

    Which is why this is now a viable product - Cheap touch panels, better batteries, and a larger market should make this product fly again - even if it is made by someone else.

    A real wireless monitor -- now that would be something to see!

    ~GoRK

  • pr0n (Score:2, Funny)

    by jimrandall ( 553083 )
    wireless pr0n in bed?
  • I did that long time ago, with a laptop!

    I think the person in charge of this stupid product should be fired. If someone knows his/her name, let's see how long he/she will stay on that position.
  • I bought one of these and cracked it open. Guess what I found inside? WIRES!

    -
  • This monitor and the similar one from Philips use WinCE & Citrix to do remote display. But what if I want to use Linux/VNC, Linux/Citrix or even my own code to display the user's sceen wirelessly?

    Well, then my customers can't use Windows XP, because the EULA says you can't display the screen on anything but a Windows PC.

    Anyone from the anti-trust suit listening? No, didn't think so.

    Vik :v)

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