On Friday I spent a good ten minutes running around to try and find a VGA cable. The reason? A client informed me, just before I headed out of the door, that their projector only had a VGA input. This, in 2018, seemed a little strange. In my bag I had a HDMI cable, but my laptop doesn’t have a VGA output, and I definitely didn’t have a cable. So, after swapping to a different laptop the hunt was on for the cable. After some swearing and a lot of hunting around, we gave up. I switched back to my original laptop and took our own projector which had HDMI input.
Why so difficult?
Well, they had a monitor, but it was high on a wall and our HDMI lead wasn’t long enough. It seemed like problem after problem, and yet this should all be so simple.
Today I’ve been on the hunt for a solution. A solution which will remove the need for me to take a projector and a set of extra cables next time. Meet Airtame. I’ll confess that I can’t really write a great deal about it because it’s really so, so simple to setup and get going. You buy one, you pop it into your bag. Then, when you’re on site you pop it into the HDMI port, take the power from a USB port on the screen and connect it with your laptop via the Airtame app. Your content will stream wirelessly, and with additional Airtame devices you can mirror the screen or display your content on multiple devices.
In the officen, you can have monitoring screens high up on the wall and control them easily and wirelessly. No cables. No clutter. If you don’t have a Windows laptop, don’t worry – they do an app for the Mac OS, for Chromebooks and for Linux too. Oh, and if you don’t have your laptop with you, don’t worry, the mobile app will let you present PowerPoint slideshows to any screen with the Airtame gadget. Currently the Android app supports JPEG and PNG images, Excel, Word, PDF, PowerPoint and web pages. Whilst it doesn’t do full screen mirroring, video will be added to the Android version soon. Meanwhile, if you have an iPhone, screen mirroring is in public beta.
The device is as small as a Google Chromecast and can easily be moved around, it is the easiest way possible to share content, whether you have a business presentation or want to display some slides in a meeting and even in classrooms, Airtame is just the thing to do it.