Guy Kewney

There's no doubt that the major bottleneck facing the PC community this year is display technology.

The PC would move rapidly out of the home office if it were designed as a domestic appliance.

Yes, products are being developed that aren't PCs, but which have them inside. They're of limited appeal, though - set-top boxes that receive TV or digital video recorders with hard disks.

And there are dozens of other concepts waiting for a big, lightweight, low-power screen. But if the PC goes into the TV room, then it has to look more like a TV.

Microsoft's Smart Display was a serious attempt to 'domesticate' the TV. But a year on, Microsoft has conceded that the concept was "ahead of its time".

The original idea was good. "The market is moving from bulky CRTs to smart, flat, thin LCD panels. They're small enough to move around - wouldn't it be great to add a wireless link and a pen, and use it in the kitchen?"

It was ahead of its time, in the sense that nobody would mind a portable display, but they weren't going to spend four times the price of a non-portable one to get it.

The problem is simple: weight, which is tied in to battery life. Even so, some people might have gone for the Smart Display if it had been a bit cheaper. And, if it had been good for anything on its own.

I used a ViewSonic airpanel Smart Display all the time at home. The trouble was that I found I was using the ViewSonic Tablet PC instead. The Tablet was the same size and pretty much the same weight, but it also worked if I took it to the pub.

You can see where the technology is going, can't you? It's getting further and further away from the point where the display and the PC are in any way related.

But clever display hardware isn't the crucial thing. What's needed is a way of carrying around your identity, not your hardware.

Inside five years, I reckon, your identity will be part of your phone. The Sim will identify you to the mobile networks and to other systems, and automatically 'patch you through' to your own data, wherever you are.

If the only display handy is your phone, that's where you'll see the data, but if you're near a PC or TV, you'll be able to divert it to that.

None of that is available today, although you could achieve a similar set-up with keyboards and mice, using USB, wireless or Bluetooth technology.

You could receive a text message on your phone, sit down at the nearest keyboard to reply and the keystrokes would be put straight into the network. You could do that now. But the display technology just isn't there.

Cheaper and lighter displays will be part of it, but far more crucial is a new way of designing software so that you can use the nearest input or output device.

In other words, the Smart Display idea will catch on when you don't have to buy one, but can use any available display. But for now, it's a dead duck, although LG and Viewsonic have made noises about carrying on without Microsoft's support.

There's no obvious reason why they can't. All the device needs to redeem it is some local intelligence, because the RDP software is available on any XP Pro-powered PC. It could be made to work - by a card-carrying nerd.

But until Microsoft starts designing RDP so that it can be used by the sort of person who wouldn't dream of painting matt vinyl on newspaper and sticking it on a wall for a projector display, all such efforts are futile.

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