ScreenDUO not 100% SideShow compatible, among other problems...

Posted by admin on 03-02-2007 in Auxiliary Display

After few weeks of waiting we finally maganged to get the ASUS screenDUO Sideshow auxiliary display... By the way, we had to buy the entire ASUS motherboard + Remote Control + SideShow Display combo just to get to the ScreenDuo display... Our test results are less than stellar and I hope that people won't get dissapointed by the wonderful Microsoft SideShow technology just because ASUS came up with a less than desirable hardware device.

First, the installation was sort of a nightmare. As previously reported by other users, the installation process is not easy. It took me 3 reboots in order to finally get ScreenDuo up and running. After the driver was installed, I went to the SideShow Panel in order to bind gadgets to my new ScreenDUO SideShow display... To my amazment, none of the Microsoft provided gadgets (both with Vista and the Office Suite) did not work. Each gadget shows as "Not Compatible"....

The first 2 gadgets (Stocks and Office Outlook Calendar) are gadgets provided by Microsoft. On the right side of the Sideshow Control panel you see the ASUS ScreenDUO SideShow Auxiliary Display shown as "Not Compatible". On the left side you see picoLCD 20x2 (review coming up soon) which is a simple character LCD with SideShow support. This rather simple sideshow device can bind to any Microsoft Sideshow gadgets while the screenDUO cannot....

I then installed the ASUS provided gadgets (about 10) and of course, the SideShow control panel got populated with (rather ugly) icons but at least 'compatible' with the screenDUO. BTW, the ASUS provided gadgets are NOT compatible with the picoLCD SideShow display and probably not compatible with any other SideShow device.

I don't know why screenDUO is not compatible with the Microsoft provided sideshow gadgets, but that seems like a big turnoff. (Personally, I don't like polluting my brand new Vista install with funny looking SideShow gadgets just because a certain device cannot display the stock ones).

IMHO, this problem stems from the fact that ASUS wanted their device to be compatible with both XP and Vista. As a result, they came up with a half baked SideShow solution, at least from a compatibility point of view.

Other nuisances include a less than desirable QVGA display brightness (only 200 cd/m^2) -- when held against a regular desktop monoitor (300-400 cd/m^2), the screenDuo becomes less visible...

Also, the navigation is questionable -- the navigation seems to be designed for left handed people (UP/DOWN/RIGHT/LEFT) controls are on the left side of the screen. Therefore if operating the screen with the right hand, you will block your own view. Most navigation controls need to be on the right side (see MSI's Mega player excellent keypad layout).

Conclusion: The ScreenDUO is a rather bad hardware implementation of Microsoft's SidesHow technology with badly written or incompatible firmware. If you have a burning desire to get a SideShow display and if you are wiling to spend $250 for a display + motherboard combo, I would advise to wait until better devices hit the market. For those who are interested in this device, here are some high resiluton pictures....