Gadgetory

smartphones are great aren't they they're small enough to go in our pocket we take them with us everywhere but i'm starting to see an interesting trend and i'm sure you are too we have phablets we have tablets we have mini tablets we have all this other stuff why because the screen on the smartphone well it just might be too small to do a lot of the stuff that we want to do so what do we do do we carry around two devices a smartphone and a tablet or a phablet or a mini tablet or whatever we're calling it this week then I've got my data across two different devices or maybe I have it stored in the cloud and I have to sync it over my limited use data plan to two different devices there by using twice as much data it sounds like a conspiracy from the carriers doesn't it but it's separate isn't there something that I can do to bring a a tablet or even like a laptop experience to my smartphone well some people think there are of course asus has their pad phone Motorola has their discontinued product that's all we'll say about that is there something that you can do with a device that wasn't specifically designed for being convertible well I've got something in hand today you're either going to love this or you're going to hate it but I want to show it to you because I think the idea is really cool it's another product from on lap it's a battery powered monitor let's go take a look now if you remember my last video that had to do with portable monitors it was kind of interesting I had this kind of Frankenstein of cords and all you guys were saying I can do this so much easier with this or with that or with the other well apparently these guys over at G chic were we're listening so what we've got now this is a battery powered monitor it has speakers back here if you can see one over on that side one over on this side it's got these nice controls over on the side it even has this little magnetic mount if you want to put a little cradle for your set your smartphone or even a tablet if you want it to right in here over on this side we've got an on-off switch we've got a power in at via a micro USB connector we've got a VGA port in and it comes with an adapter so you can take vga or with the right connections you could even do DVI and plug it in here but these are the two things that I'm really excited about it's got MHL so if you've got an MHL connection theoretically and I can get this to work on my device but I've only got one device to try on I could take this and with one cord plug it from this port into my smartphone and that's it I'm done I have sound I have power I have video all coming through this one little connector again for whatever reason I couldn't get that to work so I had to go over here to my hdmi port so this hdmi is like you saw before it comes to the table this is what it looks like this round just a nice little 90-degree connector there and then on the other end it's got an HDMI connector so into that i'm going to plug my samsung hdmi adapter that plugs into the micro USB port on the bottom of my galaxy nexus and then right in there now one downside to this it does have to be powered okay so if that's an MHL connection great it'll work but I don't have the right cables to do that so in this case I do have to provide power to this little guy right there so let's go ahead and hook everything up show you how it works go ahead and plug that in take my USB power plug that in now all of this can stay wherever you've got your monitor so if you want to set up like a virtual work station fabulous you can do that let's go ahead and set the monitor up it comes with these cool little brick things of course you wouldn't have to use these if you had a another kind of stand but it's quick it's easy it doesn't require any kind of permanent mounting I can get everything to fit down there and that's it I've got a monitor now that I can set up anywhere and have an instant workstation or I can have that sitting on my lap then I need to take this cord plug it in over here to this connector just like that and of course I can route that cable wherever I want to get it out of the way next I've got my smartphone going to go ahead and unlock it this like I said is the Galaxy Nexus and I'm just going to plug this connector into the bottom we're going to fire up some netflix we're going to play some Star Trek Enterprise I've got audio coming from the back of the monitor which might be an issue because you're firing the sound away from you well most tablets do that these days some of the new ones are changing the display is pretty good you can see I'm viewing the entire screen and it is 720 so that's fabulous is great I can now have this solution not quite as portable as you might think right there and on the go now what else can you do with this if you've got a bluetooth keyboard you can very quickly and easily tether up a keyboard and have a full screen text input experience really kind of cool we've seen something like this in the past with Windows Mobile taking it way back to like 2008 where there was literally a clamshell doc that had a screen and a keyboard and you would pair your device up to it make sure you head over to pocketnow.com i'll have a link down at the bottom of this video so that you can take a trip back in time and see what we were doing way back then this this is my work station on the go this can vary easily go into a briefcase or a backpack I can have big screen movie watching if i want to or at least bigger screen than i could on a tablet and I can have a workstation right there with that keyboard or even a bluetooth mouse if I wanted to really kind of a cool concept I like the whole mobile desk warrior concept interested to know what you think about it for more information about the product and if you want to give us some ideas and thoughts and let us know if they've improved the design head over to pocketnow.com and let us know / pocket now I'm Joe Levi thanks for watching