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Is it the world's biggest pocket PC? or a wireless display?

Wireless peripherals, such as keyboard, mouse or printer, have been around for quite some time now. "But the screen was the last hurdle to clear, to break free from the tyranny of cables," boasts Philips.

Philips has launched what it calls a wireless display for a desktop PC.

The sales pitch is enticing: "Ever wanted to work on the PC somewhere else than your cluttered desk? Or wanted to hide your clunky computer out of sight because it made too much noise or didn't fit in your interior, but couldn't, because your monitor demanded a fixed connection to your PC? Well, we've got some news for you ... "

And the blurb goes on to explain: "Philips' latest revolutionary concept allows you to break the last physical bond that has kept users chained to their stationary PCs. The Philips Detachable Monitor sets you free and allows you to choose where you want to sit while working on your computer, extending access to a PC anywhere in the home or its surroundings through wireless technology."

<1/> It's not a cordless display<1/> ... just a very big pocketPC!<1/>

It would be a great trick if Philips could have pulled it off; but despite the claims made on the company Web store this isn't a "detachable screen." It's actually a PocketPC. Just a very big one! - and set up to work as a remote terminal to a desktop PC, over a wireless LAN link.

The idea of "the world's largest PocketPC" sounds perverse. But call it a PDM, or Philips Detachable Monitor, and suddenly, you may have found a way of selling a Windows CE device for rather better margins.

It would be nice if a detachable display were truly feasible. A little time spent with a calculator suggests that it would have to wait for a new generation of wireless, running enormously faster than anything available for the home user today.

Very approximately, a 1024X768 pixel screen, running 16-bit colour, refreshing the display 50 times a second, would require something like 20 megabytes of data per second if every pixel were changing constantly. That's a lot worse than an order of magnitude too much. It's way more than you can get from the WiFi (802.11b standard) wireless link that is built into the PDM. That can only handle 11 megabits per second - and that's an absolute, theoretical maximum assuming you're about two feet away from the transmitter and there are no other users on the channel. In real life you're more likely to get 2 megabits per second, or less.

So; how is Philips managing to display the PC data on the portable screen?

<1/> Sockets for audio,power, and a stylus

A clue to what is going on comes from the detail: "The detachable monitor can operate as a standalone smart device, allowing you to play music from portable media, read electronic books and documents, or run pocket office applications (MS Word; Excel; Powerpoint etc.) Or it can serve as a digital picture frame. Via the built-in USB and PCMCIA ports, you can hook up any suitable device to the monitor - from a mouse and keyboard or webcam to a portable hard disk."

Normally, it would be quite a chore to set up a connection from a desktop PC to a PocketPC so that you can see the desktop display on the pocket screen - but Philips says it has set the thing up so that configuring the software is simple.

Of course, normally, there wouldn't be any point, because the pocket screen would be too small. With this unusual Windows CE device, the screen is a 15 inch TFT. And because it's not intended to be taken out into the street like a PDA, it can have a good sized battery, capable of powering it for a working day.

For ordinary Windows applications, this will work pretty well. The software will be something similar to Windows Terminal Server, or remote control services as provided in Windows XP; and there won't be any attempt to run live video or games - just a simple transfer of Windows control sequences and text from one machine to the other.

But for most business applications, that's fine. It's possible, after all, to do remote control of one PC from another, using something like PC Anywhere or Laplink, and this can be done over a modem link, with a little patience. And we'll have to wait for a review sample before we can start assessing what this is really good at. In particular, we'll want to know just how much of the available bandwidth of 802.11b networks gets soaked up by this product - it won't be any good if it swamps all the other WLAN users.

More details as information becomes available; including price and availability, later this week ...