2. Scraping to Screen

Connecting a PC or Mac to multiple monitors is hard enough; graphics cards often have both a DVI and VGA port, but adding a third monitor means a specialized card. DisplayLink’s chips let you run a video signal over a USB cable at 1920x1200 or 1080p resolution. DisplayLink supports Aero under Vista as well as Windows XP, or any Intel Mac-and Kensington will launch a USB Macintosh dock and USB to monitor adapters at MacWorld next week. You can have a wireless connection for your notebook too. At last year’s CES, Toshiba previewed a UWB docking station for the R400 notebook, but now that wireless USB is available, you can add an adapter to any notebook and any screen. IOGEAR will be shipping adapters soon, initially supporting 1680x1050, with 1920x1200 following later in the year.

You can have multiple screens of different sizes; DisplayLink demonstrated a mix of standard, widescreen and portrait displays connected to the same PC. Imagine a 7” portrait screen that you use just for IM and Skype, or for photos when you’re not chatting. DisplayLink was showing a reference design that manufacturers may bring out this year, using USB for both connection and power.

The company also demonstrated software for Windows Mobile that works with a USB to VGA adapter or over Wi-Fi, to send a1280x1024 image of the screen to a projector. It would work just as well to put what you see on your phone screen on a standard monitor or a TV. Product plans aren’t finalized, but DisplayLink expects to have either standard Windows Mobile software or a distribution deal in place with a phone manufacturer, by the time of Mobile World Congress next month.

Quartics showed a similar prototype Wi-Fi to VGA adapter called Mobile2Display that it plans to ship in the second quarter of this year for less than $100. Future plans include supporting more operating systems beyond Windows Mobile, and integrating the adapter directly into monitors. Both of these are ‘scraping’ what you see on the screen of the mobile device and projecting that onto a larger screen, so what you can view depends on the capabilities of the device. DataWind’s PocketSurfer 2 works the other way around: this ultra-slim pocket-sized QWERTY device displays standard Web pages, including Ajax and secure sites, because the browser is actually running on the DataWind server rather than on the PocketSurfer-you just see the output from that.

Sling has been very successful taking what’s on your TV or PVR and displaying that on your PC screen, whether you’re in another room or another country. The $200 SlingCatcher announced at last year’s CES as a way of showing content from a Slingbox will ship this year with a new feature: the SlingProjector sends the image from a PC screen onto a TV. You can choose a portion of the screen to show, which is ideal for watching clips embedded in a Web site without the distraction of banner ads and the rest of the page. You could also use it to show a presentation, or to collaborate on a document on a large screen, instead of having people crowd around your laptop.