Gadgetory

in the smartphone world a 5-inch display is a pretty sizable canvas but what if you could add say 30 inches to that i'm michael fisher with pocket now and i'm going to show you how to use the new HD 10 to put your windows phone on your TV screen the HD 10 comes packaged much like any other Microsoft accessory and here's what's inside just the HD 10 itself along with a micro USB wall charger and some very light instructional literature to get you off the ground the device requires an HDMI cable which unfortunately does not come included and the heart of the accessory is actually a two-part affair the puck itself contains all the guts to make the system work and the NFC plate a topit is removable so you can put it where you want here's why that's important you'll want to put the NFC plate somewhere convenient like the coffee table but you want the puck itself to sit near your TV or at least within range of the HDMI cable plugged into your TV you pop in the HDMI cable followed by the powerline and the single LED comes to life on the front switch your TV to the right input and boom you've got a setup screen to walk you through the pairing process the screen also gives instructions on setting up windows tablets and the puck also works with miracast certified devices of all kinds but we're just doing Lumia phones today I need to stress the lumia part of that while our HTC One m8 for Windows can see the HD 10 on our network and should be able to pair with it all it does is throw an error message so for maximum compatibility you'll want a Lumia phone with device hub version 3.5 or higher yay fragmentation anyway once you make sure NFC and Wi-Fi are both enabled on your Lumia pairing with the HD 10 is as simple as tapping the NFC plate which again you put wherever you want that takes you to the project my screen menu where you can select the screen sharing device from the list and once it connects you're in business by default the mirroring arrangement doesn't compensate for the screen differences here so your portrait phone will appear heavily pillar boxed on your landscape TV but selecting advanced settings in your device hub you can change or mirror the orientation if you're broadcasting to a TV that's sideways or upside down also you can turn on the indicator dot and select its color if you want people to be able to see or touch inputs if your TV is cutting off the extremities of the frame like ours is you need to adjust the canvas size manually using your TV's controls there's no provision in the HD 10 software for that now the portrait centric display mode is cool but it's obviously not ideal for media in some apps like my tube even rotating the phone doesn't fix this which is a bummer thankfully the default Windows Phone media player works much better meaning you can play full screen videos directly from youtube.com and even more importantly the Netflix app works just fine in full-screen to that's fine in relative terms any way to stream video from phone to TV you need to set the display on your phone to never time out because you'll lose the connection if the screen turns off also the framerate of the broadcast isn't terribly high and I ran into a few occasions where the audio skipped or errored out or the phone was just slow to connect and speaking of slow yes you can play full screen games on your TV using this device but even the slight latency of the connection makes fast paced action much much harder to deal with I'm a much better pilot than this believe me the HD 10 is better put to use as a presentation tool for sharing things like photo slideshows which really is just as simple as shuffling through your gallery picks or your PowerPoint presentation or whatever it's also great for tossing up quick YouTube videos or even sharing a webpage with your friends in a hurry and if you don't have a Bluetooth speaker but you really want to crank that house music you can even use your TV as a surrogate speaker for something like Spotify once you're connected the potential applications of a huge screen for your Lumia are limited only by your imagination and how reliable your connection is the HD 10 is available at Microsoft comm in black and white for $69.99 we've got a lot more on Windows Phone folks including a review of the Lumia 830 a review of the Lumia 930 and a live podcast full of live tiles click any of these at the links above visit PocketNow at the links below and hit that thumbs up button if you did enjoy this video until next time this has been michael fisher with PocketNow urging you to share your screens with me on twitter at captain - phone thanks for watching everyone we'll see you next time