Over the summer I did a series of articles for All About Symbian that concentrated on the Nokia N95's TV Out feature, which lets you plug it into a TV and control all its functions from the big screen. I also connected a bluetooth keyboard so the N95 was essentially just working as a CPU, its screen and controls were unused.

If anyone's interested, the first part is here and there are links to the other parts at the top of the article:

http://www.allaboutsymbian.com/featu...eat_the_PC.php

To compress it all into one sentence: TV Out works surprisingly well, and in many cases I found it an adequate substitute for a desktop or laptop, but to be really useful it needs a higher resolution and a pointing device.

Nokia's internet tablets have a much higher resolution than the N95, in fact the resolution is fairly close to a standard definition widescreen TV, so it could possibly work really well through TV Out on a large number of sets.

In theory, the tablets also have a pointing device in the stylus, though using it could be awkward as you would have to keep looking down at the tablet to see where you were pointing (at least to begin with, perhaps later you would know where to touch instinctively).

One imaginative and neat solution to the pointer problem was suggested by a reader of the articles: use your cameraphone as a Bluetooth optical mouse. There's already an application for S60 phones which lets you do exactly this a Windows PC:

http://www.allaboutsymbian.com/softw...r_Series60.php

Perhaps something similar could be done with phones and tablets?

Just to give a flavour of the potential of TV Out for those who haven't used it before:

http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=hWek4jmkYnQ

http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=bbU35ybA3Ow








I know this isn't everyone's cup of tea, but I really really really want this on a tablet! :-)

If I could use my tablet on my TV, that would be a real threat to me even having a PC as I mostly use web-based applications.