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ViewSonic AirPanel v150 Review at Ars Technica
Haxby writes "Ars Technica has a pretty thorough review of the ViewSonic AirPanel (15 inch model). You might recall that this device/design won 'Best of Comdex' in 2002, but as the review clearly shows, it's not really all that great, and it's way overpriced. The biggest problem is video performance: it sucks. Poor resolution and hideous rendering times (partly Microsoft's RDC's fault) make it next to useless. Is more bandwidth the key to making these things more palatable?"
Is more bandwidth the key to making these things more palatable?
I think better use of the available bandwidth is more important than more bandwidth. You can have all the bandwidth you want, but if it doesn't use it properley, then it'll still be a poor piece of equipment.
When anger rises, think of the consequences.
Confucius (551 BC - 479 BC)
I've only just started looking at LCDs and need to know if anyone else sees them ALL looking like trash? I'm rarely up on new hardware tech, 3D stuff doesn't impress me and the ancient 17" CRT I have has done me well. However looking at several brands of LCDs I'm wondering whether I just see them different to other people, or if they truly only have one advantage, clarity. I've taken a look at the screens on Dell, Acer and Apple laptops, 15 & 17" screens from Dell Samsung and BenQ, and a few Apple Cinema Displays. I can only say I see the BEST of them as under a quarter the quality of even an average CRT. I couldn't see any reason to pay even HALF the price of a CRT for one, let alone MORE. Anyone else see LCDs like this, or are my eyes just plaine fucked?
This is where tablet pc's should be heading. You get all the power of your desktop, in a thin and light form factor you can carry around anywhere within a decent range. I hope R&D continues on these things. Maybe even build a very basic laptop into it so you can use it to take notes when outside of the range, and get full power and sync all your data automatically when you get back within range.
Compliments to the author for including that "15 inch" reference!
The strength of these Smart Displays is that they can have the capability to be a detachable monitor: when docked, they can act just like a normal DVI display, with full video speed, acceleration, etc etc, but when you want to get up, you just pick it up and it automatically goes into "remote" mode. Bring it back and put it in the dock, and *poof* you're back in normal monitor mode.
The problem is most manufacturers haven't implemented that capability. I'm pretty sure that Viewsonic hasn't, but others (such as the Philips DesXcape) have.
Not that I've seen it in action, so who knows how well it actually works.
It is a neat idea and all, but i'd prefer a simple VGA->radio->VGA system over a tablet PC + wifi (which is what this looks like). Then I could use my wireless mouse and keyboard and be set. Back when I had a windows machine, I never needed to remotely administrate it (it was just a gaming machine-- it didn't matter if it crashed while i was out). Of course, then there is VNC if you want a full blown desktop anywhere solution.
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Crudely Drawn Games
They need to complete the package. These things were intended to be sort of like removable monitors. At least that was the initial intention. Picture this: Instead of buying a plain Jane 15" LCD panel, you pay $100 more and get the new version airpanel XP yada yada model. Now here's the key. You setup the monitor like any other LCD panel. DVI connected to your computer and all that jazz. You use it as normal, and it sits in a little docking station at your desk, which makes the connection to the DVI connection and power for battery charging... Nature calls! You have to go drop a deuce, but you don't want to stop reading the most recent Slashback. What do you do! Well, since you upgraded to the newfangeled peripheral, you just pull your monitor out of it's docking station, and, ideally, it would automatigically connect over wi-fi just as the current model does to the account you were just logged into. So maybe it blanks out for a few seconds as it transitions to the XP remote desktop mode and the Windows CE control. Or maybe it just switches to the login screen as soon as you unhook it. How cool would that be? You have the best of both worlds, and it doesn't cost all THAT much as you are getting a full monitor that works at full speed as well. Now how HARD could it be to make a hardware bypass for this thing? I swear, make this work, and quickly and easily, and these will actually sell! NOone will pay that kind of cash for a glorified gigantic PDA. The really missed the boat on this one. The original concept was "a monitor you can take with you" but instead they just made a weak-ass remote desktop unit. Get me in that think tank and I'd have set them straight... -BaumSquad
After chatting with Caesar (who also helped test the airpanel), we agreed that this device is really a "glimpse of the future". We imagine that one day we will not need to be right in front of a computer just to control our other computers. We will be able to travel anywhere in a modern city and use an independent, portable device (cell phone, PDA, tablet PC, airpanel, etc.) to access or control the PC sitting at home. Will such a day ever arrive? Who's to say? But the airpanel does seem kind of futuristic.
Not that I necessarily agree with these comments, but if such a future were to come to pass, the likely hood of me choosing my living room to host my desktop-server would be slim to none. Ah, centrailized computing, here we come again... At least the iterations are close enough to each other now that we don't ever have to implement anything - by the time we might be thinking about actually moving towards centralizing, decentralizing will be the "next (er, current) big thing" again.
You're special forces then? That's great! I just love your olympics!
I've been hoping for something like this for a long time: a tablet that I can take somewhere like out on my porch or to school or wherever, and it mimics or uses my computer at home and all of it's programs. Basically, just a screen with USB ports that can connect (not sync, actually connect) with my home computer to enable me to have a moveable workspace. :)
Keyboard, mouse, Screen, and BAM protable workstation that's EXACTLY like the one I'm used to using. I'd be willing to have some sort of trade-off of performance, i.e. for more complicated things such as video editing or Photoshop, it would have the main computer (the desktop) do the work and just send the results when done to the tablet, all I need it for is basically a fancy display that allows remote control over my main computer and a place to plug in a keyboard
I came up with the idea of a portable, wireless terminal that transmitted the KVM signals to and from your desktop PC about ten years ago for an 8th grade science project...
I got a 'C'.
XeoMage
I use an iBook with RDC to my WinXP desktop. I get a good-sized keyboard, very good battery life, and acceptable WiFi performance. Granted, video plays poorly via RDC, but cut-and-paste works betweent RDC (I use RDC in a window) and Mac OS X, so if I have to pull up a video URL, I don't have too many problems.
The iBook is very reasonably priced for this purpose; at $1100-$1200 to set up, it makes working wirelessly on a desktop a lot more fun (and then you can start thinking about getting rid of your desktop monitor and keyboard, and sticking the CPU in a more unobtrusive place . . . and opening port 3389 on your firewall at home, so you can use your home fixed IP to access the machine via RDC . . . )
I hate to defend MSFT but *please* point out a better protocol than RDC for the same CPU and bandwidth considerations...
I use RDC, VNC and X all day.. and RDC works as well as the rest.
What is video like on RDC? From some posts here, it sounds like RDC is very nice and fast- except for with video and perhaps flash animation.
I've never used RDC for any real work. Although a co-worker at one of my jobs uses it often. When he is working, he is just using his desktop via RDC. He'll listen to MP3s, web browse and do work in dreamweaver with no problems- I thought it looked pretty damn fast. IIRC it's only a 10 Mbps network too, going from where we work on campus (the helpdesk, woot) to his dorm room. A lot faster than TightVNC or X11 is at home for me, even on a 100 Mbps network.
What do I know about speed- I use a 400 MHz XScale machine as my primary box. I have a linux/win2k file server (can't fit all the MP3s on memory cards!) and occasionally use VNC or X11 to admin/get to some app I can't run on WinCE.
Can I do RDC/terminal services on Win2k without having to find some copy of Win2k terminal server? I know on XP you cna just turn it on, no? What about on 2k?
Working toward a usable PDA environment in the spirit of Newton OS: Dynapad
Only remote desktop display, and it's 6lbs???
My new Toshiba laptop with 17" display, hard drive, DVD drive, battery, keyboard, partridge in a pear tree, etc is 9lbs! What have they put in this thing???
Even the Apple powerbook with all it's internal goodies is 6+ lbs. For what it does, the weight and battery life of this thing is inexcusable. Fire your engineers!
Actually in my experience comparing RDC, PCAnywhere, and VNC, RDC blows the others away in terms of the speed and responsiveness it exhibits. It destroys VNC in other areas (copy/paste integration), and even though PCAnywhere has some file transfer capabilities, you can transfer files pretty easily with RDC in two different ways: (1) Copy a file on one end, paste it on the other, or (2) set RDC up to establish mapped drives for your remote computer so that you can copy files back and forth using normal windows networking.
I only wish there was a good client available for MacOS X, as I would love to switch to mac, but use RDC heavily and need a client with all the features available in the windows xp/2003 version.
Ironically, the word ironically is often used incorrectly.
I have an old Dell 233MHz Celeron-based laptop running Windows XP Pro and with a 802.11g card. For roughly half the price of the airpad (used at half.com), I still use RDP to connect to my desktop most of the time, but I get 5x the network speed (54Mbps) and a perfectly-capable (if somewhat outdated) independent machine that I travel with. Since I'm not *required* to use RDP, I can also pop open Mozilla in the living room if my wife is already on the desktop in the office (XP doesn't allow simultaneous console and RDP sessions).
Personally, I thought the review's take on RDP was a little harsh. It's light-years ahead of VNC (which I'm also a fan of but only for cross-platform situations), etc., transparently connects your local printers, USB devices, etc. to the remote machine, and is perfectly usable even over a dialup connection. There's even a freeware third-party utility to transfer small files w/o resorting to FTP, etc. Anyone expecting top-notch multimedia performance over a remote control via wireless is a friggin' moron. You either have to send uncompressed streams (BIG), aggressively recompress (as RDP does, leading to lag and quality loss), or implement fully-functional media playback at the local end (with all of the same codecs, etc.).
Anyway, I use RDP daily, and for general coding and browsing, I often forget that I'm running remotely.
The Achilles Heel for this device, IMHO, is price (I have a beautiful 19" Samsung LCD that was cheaper) and lack of VGA/DVI input (can't use it as a regular monitor). If I'm going to pay that much, I want a fully-functional tablet PC, not just a wirelessly-tethered LCD screen.
The only way to do this effectively would be to put hooks in the media player to divert the original compressed stream over the network and allow the decompression to occur on the screen.
As far as microsoft's implementation of RDP being abysmal, it's pretty much the most efficient of its kind out there. But I guess it's all relative to your expectations, right?
This has been done a long time ago (early 90s) by Zenith -- the Zenith Cruisepad :)
That thing had a little AMD 386 chip embedded, and ran a Citrix WinFrame client, and your PC ran a WinFrame server.
I got one recently, to play with, and tried to get it to work, but couldn't, since the Citrix SW they use only runs on windows 3.1, which I can't even find an old disk of
My own experiences with Remote Desktop are identical. Comparing even TightVNC and RealVNC to RDC shows a good jump in responsiveness by using RDC. It just feels a whole lot smoother and more responsive. I've played with the settings, done all sorts of tweaks, and while you can improve VNC, you can't match RDC with it just yet.
However, when cross-platform is needed, I still pull out my VNC client.
I wonder how many RDC exploits exist these days.
Actual laptop computer to connect to your main box wirelessly: $800.00
HP Omnibook 6000 $700 from Infinity Micro. 15" screen, plus other stuff that makes it an actual computer. So, it's not a badass machine. What do you want for $700.00? And you'd have to buy a wireless ethernet setup. Linksys W11S4PC11--about a hundred bucks from newegg.com.
Just a monitor (but it has a touch screen): $900.00
Airpanel APV150P about $880 from thenerds.net 15" screen. Oh, yeah--you still need to buy a WAP for it to talk to. Fifty bucks.
Ummm...why would you buy an airpanel? Is a touch screen really that cool.
"Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, it doesn't go away." - Philip K. Dick