UMPCs, Media Extenders, XBox, what can we learn from the consumer side of Technology

This is a great article from JK on the Run. As always I try to feature ideas that also would have some real use in the Medical arena and this looks like a potential winner to me. A Physician's Office, a hospital could benefit from some additional use with digital media too. In this example they are using a UMPC mini tablet to stream media to a large flat screen TV. Notice the UMPC at the bottom of the picture. The XBox extender provides the connectivity via the Media Extender. Since the release of the XBox 360, it can do a little bit more than just allowing XBox games. For presentations, lectures, etc. this provides a real nice method of streaming media captured on the UMPC to the large screen. Follow the link at the bottom to read the entire article. This can also give robotic surgeons the perfect reason for adding an XBox to their network for practice as there have been many articles on the web about the hand skills of surgeons being improved by playing video games too. (I know, what an excuse for getting an XBox..(smile).

This is another example on finding one more additional use for your UMPC and thank to the folks at JK on the run for enlightening us! BD

(Update for the nearsighted like me: there is a hard-to-see UMPC that's serving up music via WiFi just in front of the HDTV!)

You can set up a Windows Media Extender to have your Vista-based UMPC act as a media server over a wired or wireless LAN. Since I don't have an Ethernet jack in my family room for the Xbox 360, I set everything up over WiFi. There's not much effort required either: the Windows Media Extender dialogs walk you through everything: you just need your devices on the same network and you'll need to enter an 8-digit code provided by your Xbox 360 on your UMPC. It takes about five minutes to do the setup.