Microsoft Smart Display

» see microsoft.com/smartdisplay as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

by the time microsoft mira shipped at the start of 2003 i was around eighteen in ankara, on a 33.6k modem at home and reading donanimhaber for the pc news. the smart display surfaced in turkish tech magazines as a slightly absurd ces story. microsoft announced the concept at ces january 2002 under the codename mira and pitched it as a battery-powered wireless monitor that detached from your desk so you could keep working from the couch. bill gates demoed one on stage holding it like a clipboard. the keynote audience clapped at the pitch.

when it actually shipped a year later as "smart display" the architecture had a problem. the device was not a tablet, it was a thin client. it ran windows ce on a 400 mhz intel xscale chip with 64 mb of ram and a 1024 by 768 lcd. the device connected to a desktop pc over 802.11b and used windows terminal server in the background to mirror the host screen. while you used the smart display the host pc was locked. the licensing only allowed one smart display per pc.

the price was the part that drew the eye anyway. viewsonic's v150 launched at around $1,000 and the philips desxcape sat closer to $1,500. comparable notebooks at the time cost roughly $600 and did not need a host pc to function. nec, samsung, lg, fujitsu, trigem all had reference units announced. only a few actually shipped (cant remember which two).

~ the rap sheet ~

~ the pitch that did not survive contact ~

mira was supposed to be the "second screen" of the early 2000s home, a way to read email in the kitchen without buying a separate pc. the real consumer behavior of 2003 was instead the laptop, which had finally become affordable. tablet pc shipped in november 2002 with full windows xp and pen input, and microsoft was pushing it hard at the same time as smart display. the two products competed for the same retail dollar and the tablet pc won the argument inside microsoft.

~ the actual end ~

on december 22 2003 microsoft quietly pulled the smart display reference design. honestly the reason given to partners was drm concerns. roughly, microsoft did not want the windows ce variant on the device to become a soft point for unauthorized content playback. the manufacturers who had already shipped product were left to clear inventory. viewsonic dropped the airpanel line within months.

~ what got buried with it ~

the smart display became the obvious teaching case for "windows ce was the wrong answer to the second-screen question." it is also the proof that microsoft was thinking about the right shape three years before the ipad, just with the wrong architecture and the wrong price. the descendant that actually mattered was the ultra-mobile pc, codename origami, which microsoft announced in 2006 and which ran into the same wall at a slightly higher altitude.

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