Powering an external monitor from a laptop is appealing. One cord to the wall.
Even cooler, would be driving an external monitor from a smartphone.
Even cooler, would be driving an external monitor from a smartphone.
It'd be nice to have a more "universal" standard -- where I'm sitting at work right now I see one coworker with a ThinkPad plugged into an Apple monitor, and another with a MacBook Air plugged into a Samsung monitor, and that means both of them need one more outlet than I do. But that's a meeting of the brands I wouldn't hold my breath for.
Well. Kinda. You still have to plug in two cables. This would allow to go down to one single cable powering the laptop and sending signals to the screen.
Though, honestly, I don't trust USB to be a good protocol for transmitting a high bandwidth and very lie latency signal with it's inherently polling architecture.
Would we upsize everybody's power cord on the off chance that 1% of people would use it? Or does "bigger power brick" become another configurable option, and users have to decide in advance if they'll want display powering capabilities? Neither one's a good option, in my opinion.
More likely we'd end up with a separate class of monitor, something limited in size and with a lower maximum power draw. At which point I'd rather just deal with the power cord and get a real screen for my desk. But frequent travelers who want an accessory screen would love it.
For a while it seemed like DisplayPort or DockPort might be the one cable to rule them all... USB PD seriously changes the footing of the game. Alas, USB A/V (encoded video to an output device) being completely absent is seriously damning USB's chance to be that one cable.
That will be expensive though. You'll have to pay the medical bills for getting your back fixed after having to carry the suitcase with the batteries :).
Current cell-phones have batteries around 2 Amp-hours. At 5 volts, that's 10 Watt-hours. The least-power hungry display according to [1] is a 15 inch LED; it clocks in at 15 Watts. This means you'd be able to use your external 15 inch display for 40 minutes before completely draining your battery. That is not counting anything the phone is actually doing, just powering the display.
[1] http://energyusecalculator.com/electricity_lcdleddisplay.htm
I worry somewhat about the smartphone's battery in this context. I wonder if any have good 'passthrough' for when the battery is full and a wall socket is connected - even then I doubt it. :/
http://www.cnet.com/news/intel-aims-to-eliminate-all-pc-cabl...