A million-[insert currency] idea: For free!

[Fyron]

Streaming video is very bandwidth intensive. Wifi B can barely handle low resolution internet videos. Wifi G is a little better, and can usually stream 320x240 or 640x480 video files tolerably. I can't imagine it working well with high resolution video streaming, though. Any reasonable desktop resolution (1024xY or higher) might be too much for it to handle smoothly. Sending back input data doesn't use much bandwith, so that part probably isn't an issue.

Those small LCD screens probably have fairly low resolutions (compared to what you would want to run a computer at normally), which is why they can work with Wifi <N. When Wifi N becomes finalized, dumb Wifi consoles might become more practical.

[Atrocities]

Within the next couple of years you will see an entire industry crop up simular to that of the cell phone industry, where PC will all come equipped long range wireless capabilities and people will be able to subscribe to a wireless network and be able to connect no matter where they are. I know sprint is working on this system now.

As it stand most laptops have limited range with what they are built with now, you can plug a cell phone into them and get access over a cell phone network.

So the next logical step would be to have a dedicated independent broadband wireless network available for people who want to stay "wired" wherever they may be.

Hell I would love to see this service offered. Give up the DSL and go with a truly wireless and secure broadband ISP. This way I can sit at the beach and be able to go on line in the evening after a day of riding.

[Will]

Just to add some concrete numbers, streaming 1080i video will take about 1.5Gbit/sec bandwidth. That is currently beyond the capability of standard wireless technology. However, adding in a chip that can do hardware MPEG decoding should reduce the needed bandwidth to on the order of 300Mbit/sec. Which is still outside the range of the 54Mbit/sec of current standard wi-fi (802.11g), but is within reach for the draft 802.11n standard. As long as there is dedicated hardware encoding and decoding to prevent taxing the general CPUs, it should be do-able soon-ish.

[Combat Wombat]

Soon we will have USB 3.0 which will be a wireless standard that has the same transfer rates as USB 2.0 has over wires and is deisgned to work with stuf like this. I am afraid its planned range may not be enough for this.

[Fyron]

Can you provide us with a source for that info, CW?

[frightlever]

Can't you basically do this with a PDA running Remote Desktop Software to access your base PC?

[Fyron]

No. You can use remote desktop/vnc to access a PC from a laptop too, but neither one is a solution to the problem at hand. You can't do much with hardware video streaming over vnc/rd. They can display the slow rate software video layer fine (the windows desktop), but they have much trouble with high frame rates (such as video files and 3d games).

[Will]

Remote Desktop is a little different from video streaming or VNC. Video streaming would be taking a fixed framerate capture of the remote screen, and VNC takes a series of screenshots and JPEG compresses them to send over to the viewer (no guarantee of fixed framerate). Remote Desktop, however, sends the actual Windows API messages to the client as well as the base machine. So, it would require a bit more computing power at the receiving end, but would lower bandwidth because all that would be needed to be sent is the theme information at the start (what color are titlebars, etc.), and the information Windows uses to set up a window. The result is instead of sending a picture of a 500x500 empty window that has a titlebar saying "Hello, world!", you send the messages Windows sends to create a 500x500 empty window with the same titlebar. The result is a much snappier response compared to VNC/video streaming for the interface (especially the mouse position), while having similar performance to sending something like a JPEG being displayed. --edit: or playing a movie, or a 3D game... you get the idea.

[Fyron]

3d games don't do much at all with the win32 api though...

[frightlever]

Oh okay. So the problem then is using existing technolgy for the display and waiting for compression and wireless technologies to catch up.

What I need for away from base computing is pretty much limited to browsing and ebooks. From the original post:

"Here's the pitch:
In this age of wireless internet, laptops are great, even if you never leave your house: You can surf on the sofa, browse in the bath... you get the idea. However laptops have their downsides:
- You can't pull out a graphics card or processor and slot in a new one as easily as you can with a desktop, so they quickly go out of date.
- They are bloody expensive to boot.
- Battery life limits just how "wireless" these machines can be."

Battery life is the real limit here. Valve are predicting the end of the GPU with increasing numbers of CPU cores so video cards are moot long term. I can also replace my CPU add memory etc to my main PC and not have to upgrade my wireless screen, right? But a 15 inch TFT is for buttons these days so the screen is becoming one of the cheapest, commodity, items in the set up. But wait there's more... wireless transmission speeds are changing every 18 months or so. Not as bad as with grafix cards but getting there. So who's going to settle for an old slow screen when there's a new faster one out with a better response time and more vibrant colours? Come what may there'll be an upgrade cycle.


Not convinced traditional gaming needs to be mobile anyway. How do you do mouse and keyboard with a lapscreen(tm)? Heck, if you want wireless gaming just buy a DS. In fact just buy a DS anyway, those things rock.

Oh and if we're not talking gaming so much then yeah PDA with RDP. Or a laptop since they're also a lot cheaper than they used to be.