4 minute read
Gadget of the Month
BILL & PHIL’S GADGET OF THE MONTH More Screens Please! | Bill Ramsey & Phillip Hampton
The latest craze in laptops is dual screen displays. We saw many of these new form factors in the coming attractions at CES—some with two screens connected by a hinge, and some with a flexible screen that could be folded in half. We have seen the future, and the future is two or more screens on your laptop. We have also seen that this future is not going to be cheap. Nonetheless, you don’t have to wait until these expensive new laptops hit the market to join the multi-screen craze. And you don’t have to break the bank either.
We found an add-on second screen option that can be paired with just about any laptop called Mobile Pixels Duex. The 12.5-inch second screen is just $250 and is very easy to “install” on your existing laptop. We bought one and used it with a Surface Laptop. The Mobile Pixels Duex is almost a half-inch thick and weighs 1.7 pounds—it can be attached to the back of your laptop screen with the included magnetic metal plates. It connects and receives power via a USB cable that you plug into the host laptop. Basically, we just plugged it in and it worked—that’s the kind of installation process that we like.
The Mobile Pixels Duex slides out from its protective case (attached to the back of your laptop) and can be rotated
270 degrees. We have used it primarily as a second screen on our laptop. So, now when we’re on the go and sorely miss having a large monitor like we have back at the office, we can just pull out the Mobile Pixels Duex as a second monitor and not feel cramped. We have also found it to be very useful when sharing content from our laptop (spreadsheet, document, or presentation) in a one-onone situation with someone sitting across the table. We simply rotate the Mobile Pixels Duex 180 degrees, and it serves as mirror display for the person sitting across from us.
While the Mobile Pixels Duex is an economical solution to the need for a mobile second screen for our laptop, it is not necessarily the most aesthetically pleasing solution. The second screen does add some thickness and weight to the laptop when attached. The USB cable also tends to get in the way when rotating the screen around. When we are not using the second screen, it is easy to detach from the laptop, because it is held in place by magnetic metal plates which you affix to the back of your laptop display. These metal plates don’t particularly bother us, but they do look sort of out of place when the Mobile Pixels Duex is not attached. However, for the relatively low cost, we can overlook these minor inconveniences in order to add a sexy, trendy second screen to our old hardware.
There are other similar solutions, but they are more bulky, such as the Asus ZenScreen touch ($339), the AOC USB Monitor ($150), the Lenovo ThinkVision M14 ($250), the Asus Zen Screen Go (a more portable monitor at $250), and the HP EliteDisplay (even more portable at $220). The problem is, however, these are all separate monitors and add a lot more bulk. A competitor to the Pixels Deux is the SideTrak Portable Monitor ($300), but the display is dim and the mechanism is clunky.
Bill thinks he has the best solution for those who carry a laptop and an iPad. You can turn an iPad into a second screen with a cable and an app called Duet Display ($9.99 for a version that requires a cable attached to the computer; the wireless version costs $19.99 per year). Uncharacteristically, Bill chose the cheaper, wired one.
With Duet Display, you install the app on your iPad, attach the iPad to your laptop via a USB cable, and install a free app on your laptop. Magically, the iPad turns into a second display for your laptop. If you have the larger iPad with the 12.9-inch display, it almost matches the display on a laptop with a 13-inch display. Duet Display allows you to use the touchscreen capabilities of the iPad with zero lag in the movement from the laptop display. Sweet!
Finally, if you have a MacBook, there is a built-in app called Sidecar. It works great. You can use the iPad as a touchscreen for your Mac, even though (for some reason) no MacBooks have a touchscreen. n
Mas segundas pantallas por favor,
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