Intel: Small devices with big screens
Intel is working on technology that would allow handheld Internet devices to wirelessly use big screens.
Intel Mobile Internet Device could connect wirelessly to a big screen.
All technology is a problem looking for a solution (or the converse). Intel is working on technology that would mitigate one of the inherent problems with ultra-small devices: ultra-small screens. Vic Lortz, a research scientist and senior architect at Intel's Communications Technology Lab in Hillsboro, Ore., discussed a technology that would include a wireless display feature on big-screen digital TVs allowing Mobile Internet Devices, or MIDs, to wirelessly use the display on a big screen.
"Imagine if digital TVs included a wireless display feature (either integrated or through an external adapter) so that a MID could easily use that large display instead of or in addition to the integrated screen of the MID," he writes. "Intel is working on this and other similar problems...As we identify the necessary set of technologies and standards to support, we will integrate them into our next-generation mobile devices (both laptops and MIDs)."
Lortz says the success of the MID may ride on whether technologies like this come to fruition. "If we succeed, the MID may confound its detractors and become the next big thing after all."
Brooke Crothers has been an editor at large at CNET News, an analyst at IDC Japan, and an editor at The Asian Wall Street Journal Weekly, among other endeavors, including co-manager of an after-school math-and-reading center. He writes for the CNET Blog Network and is not a current employee of CNET. Disclosure. 
