Your smartphone is supposed to be your complete mobile office—your all-in-one voice and data portal to the outside world. You can access all of your e-mail, Calendar appointments, Contacts, Tasks, and documents. So why is it that, when you run out the door to make that sales presentation, you still bring your laptop PC with you? The answer, or course, is that you need the laptop to make the presentation. And when you get to your meeting you still have to pull it out of its case, power it up, connect it to the projector, and load your presentation.

Wouldn't it be nice if you didn't have to go through all of that trouble? As it turns out, you don't have to if you have a smartphone and the Impatica ShowMate (impatica.com/showmate).

Losing the laptop

The Impatica ShowMate is a small Bluetooth-to-VGA adapter that lets you connect your smartphone directly to a projector. Imagine walking into a client's conference room with your smartphone and the less-than-three-ounce ShowMate in your pocket. You plug it into the projector, pull out your smartphone, and start giving your presentation—no laptop in sight! You navigate seamlessly through your slide deck standing up, not sitting behind a notebook PC. This is not some scene from the future—this is today, and I regularly do this with the ShowMate.

Presenting with the ShowMate

In order to use the ShowMate, you need to install some software on both your PC and your smartphone. The desktop-based software lets you convert a PowerPoint file into a format that can be used by the ShowMate software on your smartphone. The PC software turns the PowerPoint presentation into a series of compressed images that can be copied or e-mailed to your smartphone. The compression settings can be modified by the user to balance image quality with file size. Once the images are on your smartphone, they can be opened by the ShowMate software installed on your device. The software then allows you to connect to the ShowMate adapter via Bluetooth or a direct USB cable connection. (The first time you connect via Bluetooth, you have to enter a passcode, which comes from the serial number on the bottom of the ShowMate adapter.) Once the smartphone is connected to the ShowMate, it proceeds to send the selected presentation to the ShowMate. Even before the entire presentation has been sent, the first slide is displayed, and the smartphone can be used to navigate through the presentation.

Displaying the smartphone's screen

A newly-released software update to the ShowMate provides a very powerful feature: the ability to output the smartphone's display to the projector. This can come in handy if you are demonstrating smartphone features and software, allowing you to project them on a screen instead of passing the device around a room. You could even use the feature to pull up and project e-mails, documents, even mobile Web sites during a presentation. Companies could even create sales applications to take advantage of this feature. For example, they could design a mobile app that provided an interactive matrix, feature comparisons, or product configuration tools with the intention of having the information projected onto a large screen to facilitate communication and collaboration. This type of application, combined with laptop-less PowerPoint, would take mobile sales force automation to the next level.

My first-hand experience

While the ShowMate is an amazing device, it isn't perfect. The process of converting and outputting a PowerPoint presentation is somewhat cumbersome at first. But once you do it a few times it gets pretty easy. The conversion software worked fairly well, but I did find that it did not always render all PowerPoint presentations accurately. However, I discovered that most of those problems were with PowerPoint 2007 documents. If I first saved those as PowerPoint 2000/2003 documents, and then converted them to ShowMate format, the issues were mostly resolved.