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Wowing the crowd on the first day of its developer conference in San Francisco, chipmaker Intel showed off its WiDi technology, beaming content back and forth between a handheld tablet and large-screen HDTV wirelessly.
WiDi technology is not exactly new, having been shown off at CES back in January on specific Intel powered laptops, but now the firm seems to have found a more practical use for the technology, on Atom powered tablets.
This means Intel powered tablet users will be able to stream high-def video and games from their laptop, desktop or Atom powered TV to their tablet.
“Toilet gamers rejoice!” ran the twitter commentary as many realized the maybe not entirely earth-shattering potential.
WiDi is built on a Wireless HD standard which is supposed to offer up to 4 Gbps at a 10 meter range, with no requirement for ‘line-of-sight’. It operates in the 60 GHz Extremely High Frequency band, which some fear may suck rather a lot of life out of the battery of any tablet beaming content back and forth, but as long as it’s destined for indoor use, that shouldn’t be a critical problem.
It will be interesting to see whether Intel attempts to use its old trick of bundling WiDi with Atom in order to boost sales of the little CPU, or whether the firm will push the WiDi technology itself by allowing it to work on rival ARM’s processors.
Our friends over on Netbook News shot a video of the demo which you can watch below:
Interestingly, in the same keynote as the WiDi demo, Intel also managed to sneak in the comment that the iPad was part of the firm’s “internet connectivity” push, a claim it can only make based on the recent acquisition of Infineon’s wireless division WLS. But judging on the rumors we’re hearing, that may not be a boast Intel can make for too much longer.
