We look at some options for extending your desktop to your mobile device
A dual monitor setup is quite a common sight these days, both at work or at home. We’ve used a dual monitor for some years and found the extra screen ‘real-estate’, as they call it, a great advantage when researching, transferring files and coping with multiple versions of a program open at the same time.
There is, however, a slight problem with having a dual monitor setup, and that’s the amount of space taken up. While you can get away with a smaller computer desk when using a single monitor, once you include another one, your desk space decreases significantly.
The solution, of course, could be to get a bigger desk. But that requires more room, taking up space in your bedroom or whereever else it is you work and play. It soon becomes a bit of a bind, having a sizeable desk in your home. The same could be said at work as well. So what’s the alternative?
As it happens, there are a number of apps available for both iOS and Android devices that will allow you to extend your PC’s desktop to a tablet or phone. It makes perfect sense, when you stop to think about it. Most of us have a tablet lying around – sometimes one that’s not even being used. Most of the tablets we own are of a decent size too, at least 10 inches or slightly bigger, so they make for a good display. More to the point, the screens on the tablets are usually good quality too.
So grab a spare tablet, and join us as we look at how to extend and use a mobile device as a second (or, indeed, third) screen for your PC.
Paid Or Free?
There are a number of useful screen extension apps available for iOS, Android and Windows Phones. Some are free, but feature adverts or a limited connection time. Other are paid for apps and add a finer degree of control or extra features.
Which you decide to go for is up to you, but we’ve managed to include a selection of each with instructions on how to activate them as a second display and get them working under a Windows PC installation.
Let’s start by looking at the Free apps.
Splashtop
The first app we’ll look at is the immensely popular Splashtop XDisplay.
The company behind Splashtop has been around for a while now and has in that time produced some handy resources. The one we’re looking at here is Splashtop Personal, using the Splashtop Streamer to remotely connect to our Windows laptop from an Android tablet for use a second screen.
The process is easy enough. All you need to do is look over the Splashtop Personal site, at goo.gl/De8ZME and find the Streamer for the OS you’re connecting to (in our case Windows).
Once downloaded, install the Streamer program on the PC and choose the ‘Just Myself’ option when asked. Incidentally, the other option, ‘All Users’, will allow the Streamer app to connect to the PC that the installation is on regardless of who’s logged in and currently using it. It’s a security issue, so for the time being we’ll stick to the Just Me option.
After you click on the Finish button, the Splashtop Streamer will launch and offer you a number of options. The first thing to do is create a Splashtop account, by entering your email and a password, then clicking on the Create Account button.
You’ll then receive an email detailing the other Splashtop products, for both PCs and mobile devices. However, instead of installing any of them, grab your Android tablet and search the Play store for Splashtop Extended Display HD.
When you’ve installed the app, start it up, and it’ll inform you that you’ll only have five minutes of connection time. It’s a shame, but it’s a good start to the experiment we’re trying out here.
Now from the PC, click on the Security tab within Splashtop Streamer and enter a password. Once done, the Android app should display your discovered PC. All you need to do now is tap the PC, enter the security code and your tablet will become a second screen for your PC.
You may have to sort out the extended displays on the PC side, and depending on the graphics driver you have installed, that can either be extremely easy or an immense pain in the neck. Either way, you’ll have five minutes of connection to the extended screen.
Air Duet Screen-Second Display
A slightly easier app this time around, but not one without its flaws.
The Air Duet Screen-Second Display app is used in conjunction with the AirScreen Server, a small program that can be found at goo.gl/Twt4gs. You’ll need to install the server portion to your PC first and activate the TightVNC driver it uses to connect to the Android app.
Installing the PC software is easy, but it’s not a very well translated or developed program. After the installation, the program asked us for our SSID, which seemed a little dodgy, but as far as we could tell there was no sign of anything untoward going on.
We didn’t enter our SSID, by the way, because we were using an Ethernet connection, but once the server was installed, the Air Duet Screen-Second Display found the IP address of the laptop on our network, and with a single tap it connected.
The extended screen was instantly recognised by the PC, and we could move windows around and control the mouse with our finger as needed on the touchscreen. It’s an extremely simple app and it works.
There are some flaws, though, as we mentioned. For one, the adverts along the bottom of the screen are very annoying, and you occasionally get blitzed by a ten second full screen ad for some random game.
As we said, though, it works, and it’s a quick-fix solution.
Paid Apps
There are a few more free versions to consider, but in all honesty they’re pretty dire. Some won’t connect at all, while others open up a browser to some illegal site, ask to download something that looks immensely dodgy or contain so many adverts that using the tablet as a second screen is a nightmare.
Putting them aside, then, let’s look at what you get if you’re prepared to dip into your wallet. They don’t cost much generally, but you do get a better connection and more features compared to the free version. Also, most of them don’t have adverts, which is a benefit we can all appreciate.
iDisplay
iDisplay started out as an iOS app, hence the name. Now, though, it caters for both Windows and Android platforms, connecting them seamlessly.
iDisplay works in two parts, much like the free examples we just looked at. One part is the free iDisplay Desktop, available for Windows and Mac OS X. The other is the iDisplay app, for Android and iOS devices, which costs £3.13.
Start by downloading the free desktop program from goo.gl/27R42s. When installing, it’ll set up the custom video driver, which came out as a unidentified publisher for our Windows 7 PC, but it’s okay to choose the Install Anyway option.
After a system restart, you’ll get a little iDisplay icon in your system tray, with which you can tweak the connection setting if needed – we left ours on Auto, and it worked perfectly fine.
The next step is to pay for and install the iDisplay mobile version. Once that’s downloaded and installed, it’ll automatically search for any iDisplay running computers and display them in the main window.
All you need do is tap the PC with the program installed and it’ll make the connection, asking you if you want to always allow a connection from the mobile device.
iDisplay is far superior to any of the free solutions we looked at. It’s fast, there’s no noticeable lag, no adverts, and it connects and sets up a 1280 x 960 display on the Note 10.1 tablet we’re using. The only slowdown we had was when the network was being strangled by a large copy across two wi-fi machines, although you’ll notice a far better connection when you connect the two devices together via a USB cable.
Within iDisplay, you’re able to enable Windows sounds, autoconnect to the host whenever the app is started, display the current tablet battery status as a widget and alter the resolution for better speeds and access.
In short, it’s everything you could ask for from a second screen.
Air Display 2
Air Display from Avatron Software is one of the more well-known second screen apps for connecting Android and Windows platforms. It’s certainly good, although we’ll go out on a limb and say it’s not as good as iDisplay. That said, it’s worth giving the software a try.
Air Display works in the same way as all the other apps previously mentioned. There’s the app itself, which costs £7.66, and there’s the free Air Display host program for installation on your PC.
Start by downloading the PC host program, by heading to goo.gl/iO6KuW. You’ll need to fill in a quick form first, detailing your email address, first name, last name and OS (Windows 7 or later, or Mac OS X 10.7 or later). Once complete, you’ll be emailed the link to the download (or if you want, you can simply enter downloads.avatron.com/AirDisplay_Setup.exe into your address bar).
Setup for the host PC is simple. Once you’ve agreed to the licence, the installer will set up the program and prepare the connection and video driver. After a quick restart, there’ll be an icon in the System Tray.
With Android or iOS, once the app has been paid for and installed, it’ll automatically start to look for a connecting host PC. There are two ways you can connect and use the tablet as your second and extended screen. The first is by tapping the relevant host icon in the discovered window of the app, and the second is by clicking on the Connect button from the expanded icon in the System Tray on the host PC.
Either way will work, and both will auto pick up the other when the pairing software finds anything on the same network.
The connection is very similar to the previous iDisplay. There was barely any lag, and the second screen worked well, although in this version, the colours did seem a little muted, and there occasions where a window that was dragged over needed to be refreshed to be displayed correctly.
However, with a little tweaking, you can achieve a reasonable working second screen for your PC. We did have a couple of problems, though. The obvious negative point with Air Display 2 is the fact that it costs £7.66 – nearly twice as much as iDisplay. Both do a good job, and they’re essentially using the same connection technology and will therefore operate in largely the same way.
The other problem with Air Display 2 is that it did make our Android tablet a little unstable after ten minutes or so of use. This could have been because we were moving all sorts of windows from one screen to the next and seeing how animation played. The overload could have sent the app into a twist and caused a problem, but we think it may have had something to do with the pretty weak wi-fi the Note 10.1 has.
More Paid For Apps
As with the free apps, there are a number of other paid-for apps. We could go into detail about these, but there seems little point, as they all use the same setup with a host PC program and a locally installed app, together with the same connection technology.
Bearing that in mind, we covered what we think are the best two paid solutions, just as we did for the free versions.
Conclusion
There are quite a few ways to connect your tablet and use it as a second screen for your PC. As we’ve seen, some of the options available are really very good and can be used effectively with your PC to aid productivity. Others, though, lack the bandwidth to be effective and are more of a novelty rather than something you would consider using as a full-time substitute for a ‘real’ second screen.
Speaking of which, depending on what you plan to use a second screen for, and from what we’ve experienced during this experiment, we think there’s really no proper solution other than using a dedicated second monitor. The apps and their host programs are good, but in reality there are too many obstacles for them to replace a decent monitor – at least for the time being, anyway.
Honourable Mentions
If you’re interested in looking into a few more second screen apps, then check out some of these:
SecondScreen: A free app that is more for mirroring rather than being used as an extension, but it can be tweaked to work as a true second screen. It’s a little flaky, though, and tends to crash.
MaxiVista: An iOS-only app but one that’s supposedly quite good. We haven’t tried it, so you do so at your own risk.
Duet Display: Another iOS app, this is a little more expensive than MaxiVista. Again, though, we didn’t try it.
Crazy Remote Pro: An Android app that works more like a remote desktop solution, but again it can be tweaked to allow second screen use. We did try this, and it while it worked for a brief time, it did fail and crash the tablet a couple of times.