So in the last post, I mentioned that I now have this beautiful Acer H233H monitor sitting on my desk, not connected to anything. I also have the Logitech 2.1 powered speakers, with the sub woofer also sitting on the desk not hooked up.
I figured that my iPad had a decent CPU in it. Maybe I can put that in place. So unpacked my AV Adapter for the iPad. This is the one with the male dock connector on one side (plugs into the iPad), and female HDMI and dock connector on the other side. I plugged the adapter into the iPad, the sync cable hooked up to my 10w charger into the wall and the other side into the adapter. Then I took the HDMI cable that connected my monitor to the PC and plugged it into the AV cable. The Monitor came to life. This was pretty neat!
I could see a mirror of everything that was on the iPad screen. And since the iPad was plugged into power, the screen would dim, but never shut completely off (no need to unlock the iPad every so often).
At that point I grabbed my bluetooth apple keyboard. I paired it with the iPad and now it almost seems as if I have my computer back!
On to the speakers!
The Logitech 2.1 speakers have two 3.5mm jacks on the side of one of the speakers - the speaker with the volume and bass controls. One of the jacks is for headphones. The other jack has a music note above it. This is for your iPod / MP3 player. I took a male to male 3.5mm cable and plugged one end into the speaker. I took the other side and plugged it into the headphone jack of the iPad, launched Pandora, and I was instantly streaming music.
At this point I was pleased with the way the iPad so easily took the (physical) place of my old home computer.
One thing that was interesting is that when the monitor is mirroring the iPad, the black 'pillars' exist on either side of the monitor. The image on the monitor is definitely 'bigger' but the aspect ratio is the same as the iPad screen. It doesn't take up the entire monitor. This got me thinking. I opened up NetFlix, selected an episode of Man vs. Wild and hit the play button. The iPad screen went blank for a moment and a message came up that the video was playing on the TV. It sure was! Full screen, HD and all. This works with anything video related on the iPad. NICE!
Throughout all of this, My USB Keyboard and mouse were still sitting on the desk. I already mentioned that I am using the apple BT keyboard, so I wrapped up the USB keyboard and put that in the closet. The mouse is a different story. Turns out that there is really no way to use a mouse with the iPad. All my research suggests that is because apple doesn't want to hurt their MacBook sales. Makes sense, doesn't hurt my feelings. I could JailBrake the iPad and use a BT mouse - but for now thats not the direction I'm going. I'll just use the iPad touch screen / gestures for the time being.
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