Charles Arthur on Technology: Screen test

In February last year I wrote here about the promise of "home media servers", which would store all your video, photo and music files on a single machine that you could then access all over the house using, say, a wireless connection. Bill Gates had shown one off called "Mira" at the Las Vegas Consumer Electronics Show, which let you wander around the house carrying a touch-sensitive screen that would connect wirelessly (using 802.11b, aka Wi-Fi) to your PC running XP, and let you e-mail, surf the web and pipe music to where you were sitting. It sounded like a home media server, even if it was using your PC, and didn't include the TV element. Still, a theoretical start.

Since then, you'll have noticed that home media servers have made virtually zero impact. Nor have Personal Video Recorders (PVRs), which let you record TV on a hard-disk based box, challenged hot cakes in the sales stakes.

Why? A mixture, I suspect, of consumer exhaustion (we're still trying to incorporate all the other technologies introduced in the past few years into our lives) and the hassle of wiring all this stuff up. Hence, the revolution has been unavoidably delayed: we've been busy doing other stuff, and nobody has Ikea-d the technology we need. It's not a flatpack. There's no plug-and-play way to link your home up. It's all unpack-and-puzzle.

Undaunted, Microsoft's Mira – bathetically renamed Smart Display – has arrived. Viewsonic and Philips are the first two companies off the blocks offering what is essentially a screen-without-a-keyboard.

Now, you might have some déjà vu here, since only last November Microsoft and allied manufacturers introduced the Tablet concept. This, you'll recall, takes a laptop and by some ingenious hinging lets you put the screen on top of the keyboard; you then write with a special stylus on the screen, and the operating system interprets your scrawl, sometimes even correctly.

Though Tablet sales haven't been overwhelming (only 1 per cent of sales so far, about 72,000 since they started selling, and likely to sell about a million over a year), the concept is intriguing.

Not so, I'm afraid, with the Mira. I've seen it and examined it twice and this is one of Bill Gates's turkeys. The trouble starts right out of the box. Smart Display is aimed at the home user, correct? Yet to use one, you must be running Windows XP Professional; XP Home version lacks a vital program needed for remote use of a monitor. So you'll have to upgrade your system. At least the monitor companies throw in (or I suspect Microsoft provides) a copy of XP Pro upgrade to do this, but it's still a step you'd rather not have to go through. And if you haven't got Windows XP Home, you'll have to get that first.

Then there's the Display itself. You have the standard 1024x768 pixels across a 10 or 15-inch liquid crystal screen, wirelessly connected to your PC, showing you just what you'd see if you were sitting in front of it. Fine so far. Now, what do you want to do? Read your e-mail? How? There's no keyboard. But aha, you have a touch-sensitive screen and an onscreen keyboard. Trouble is, to be any use to you, the onscreen keyboard has to be quite big (limiting the view of what you're writing), and you'll either be pecking with your stylus or smudging the display with your fingers. Either way, you aren't going to be composing long messages. E-mail is a more interactive proposition, requiring more writing than you'd expected.

How about surfing the web? Well, unless your browsing habits are very constrained – only a few sites, not much on-the-fly searching – then you're going to be using that virtual keyboard again, which will quickly become annoying, especially when you realise that typing in URLs and so on requires a lot more typing than you'd have thought. In fact, using the net altogether is an interactive experience, and touch screens constrain that interaction.

Oh hell. Well, how about playing music? This is all the Smart Display can do – the bandwidth of a Wi-Fi connection (at best, 11 megabits per second) can handle compressed audio easily, but not video. Certainly, you can listen to your music piped through your Smart Display. Pity about the tiny speakers and lousy reproduction; the £1,000 that it cost you (did I say that's the typical price tag? Perhaps I didn't want to scare you earlier) could probably have paid for speakers for each room in the house plus wiring. Digital pictures? If you like. Wouldn't it make more sense just to print them out, though?

So things aren't great over at the Smart Display. But it gets worse. While someone is using it, nobody else can use the PC. Yes, only one user at a time on XP Pro. If I'd been the marketing manager at Viewsonic or Philips and discovered this I'd have killed Smart Display manufacturing in a heartbeat. How resolutely dim of Microsoft to produce something that renders your central PC useless.

Keith White, senior director of Microsoft Windows Embedded (which is responsible for the Smart Displays' operating system, Windows CE, inter alia) says XP Pro will enable multiple concurrent users in a Windows Service Pack "in the next year". In the meantime, no.

So, let's get this all straight. We have a display that can access the files on your computer. It works wirelessly. You can (if you're determined) use it to do exactly the same things you could with a normal computer – say, a laptop. And it costs the same as a low-end laptop.

So why not just buy a laptop computer with built-in Wi-Fi? It'll do all the same things, plus it'll be easier to type all your e-mail and things. And it'll be your own; you can share files and stuff if you like with the other machine (or even put your mail files and so on into a shared folder, if you're feeling brave). And you won't even have the heart-in-mouth upgrade to XP Professional.

White didn't have much of an answer to this, except to say that the beta testers of the Smart Display (who tended to have multi-computer homes) had loved it and to agree that the price had to drop substantially – say, halving from the present level.

"When [the beta-testers] had the screens and then we took them away for an upgrade, they missed them," says White. OK, so what did they use them for? "E-mail, web surfing, instant messaging, listening to music, browsing digital pictures..." As you'd expect, he was full of the promise of the technology. But sometimes promises are broken. Comrades, for reasons beyond our control – but which could easily have been avoided by some sensible design – the home media revolution has once again been unavoidably delayed.