Jon Peddie Research - a technically oriented marketing, research, and management consulting firm in the graphics industry.

The Nanovision Mimo UM-710 - USB powered external monitor

Posted by Kathleen Maher on March 3rd 2009 | Comments Closed |
Categories: Hardware Review
Tags:

No points for neatness here, but the ability to fold the desk up and hide all the business going on in this desk is important and the Nanovision Mimo 710 provides a little more screen real estate at almost no real cost in space. (Source: Jon Peddie Research)

According to the compact little manual, getting the Mimo display up and running should take about a minute. So okay, it took me longer. First, there was a bit of head scratching about how to attach the microphone as the instructions told me to do, but ohhh, this is a 710, it doesn’t have a mic.

The Mimo 710 is a nifty little 7-inch supplemental monitor that attaches to the PC via USB thanks to DisplayLink’s technology. DisplayLink’s low cost little ASIC resides in the monitor. Plug in the USB cable to the computer, install the drivers, reboot (even though the instructions fail to mention this step) and you’re in business. The drivers include a control button on the task bar. The on/off and plus or minus brightness controls are easy to reach buttons on the side.

The monitor features support for pivoting from landscape to portrait to upside down. (And why would you want to set it to upside down? Well, maybe you’d want to hang it on top of monitor and plug the USB into the top. How often this comes up, I have no idea, the important thing is that you can.) There’s no accelerometer in the thing so you turn it and then use the dialog box on the task bar to tell it what you did. It doesn’t update instantly so if that’s something that might drive you crazy so be forewarned. Personally, I don’t find myself moving back and forth between portrait and landscape. I have found landscape to be the best size for what I do.

So, why do you want an additional 7-inch monitor? I want a little monitor because I have a smallish fold out desk in my office. My monitor fits into a nice little cubby hole in the desk. I could add another full-size monitor but then I wouldn’t be able to close up the desk—not easily anyway and the extra monitor wouldn’t fit so easily into the cubbyhole.

That’s me of course, why might you want a little monitor? Space is always at a premium and with this little baby you can add a third, or fourth monitor (or fifth)—that’s the beauty of the DisplayLink strategy—the ability to add a display is independent of the graphics board. You might want to use the monitor for widgets, especially to monitor social networking sites. You can monitor a totally boring web cast, or watch a TV show while you work—not that anyone would do such a thing, would they? Opting for the higher-end version with web camera and touchscreen capabilities opens up a whole host of possibilities including monitoring the baby while you work, watching the house while you’re out of town, or live chatting while you work. The touchscreen adds a new level of input and you can use it for a handy doodle pad.

To get back to me again, the main thing I use the additional space for is to open up notepad and make notes as I research the web.

There are minuses—but I find them minor. There is a slight lag time as the files dragged to the monitor scale and if it’s web pages I find I have to move it to the little monitor and go full-screen for the page to resize to the monitor’s resolution but again, that doesn’t seem a practical usage model. Also, when your computer reboots itself in the middle of the night as it inevitably will, the monitor might have trouble finding itself when the computer comes back to life after installing the latest patch and updates and god knows what all. If so, unplugging the monitor and plugging it back in works. When I tried to use the tool bar utility to extend the monitor, my machine crashed and the tool bar utility disappeared. Obviously, there are driver issues somewhere. It doesn’t matter. Use the control panel/display dialog to extend the monitor or set it to mirror. You don’t need another start up program anyway.

I’m delighted that a smaller monitor exists—it’s just about what I’ve been looking for. The wide-screen format is perfect, the flexibility of a USB connection is fabulous but if I could have one little thing I’d like a slightly larger version and I have no doubt such a thing is on the way.