----- Original Message -----
From: "Jake Khuon" <khuon@neebu.net>
I think the form-factour is already there. I have a Motorola Atrix smartphone. It's available with a laptop-dock unit. This is essentially a USB hub and display. The display is connected by outputting from the phone's HDMI port. The rest of the input/output device (keyboard and trackpad) are seen as USB connected devices and interfaced via the phone's USB port (Atrix supports USB host mode).
Essentially, this laptop dock is what people are talking about except for a generic host instead of for a phone. We would want to expose the HDMI input generically and probably with an additional VGA input. Of course there are also VGA-HDMI converters. Anyone wanna ring up Motorola to see if they're interesting in adapting the Atrix laptop-dock technology?
As someone who's done video for 20 years, I can tell you, Jake: It ain't that easy. The interface on the Atrix is purpose-built, and it's almost certainly just a DVI/HDMI digital interface to a panel that expects that. What's necessary for a standalone KVM of the sort we're talking about is what the video people call a "genlock" circuit -- most machines that need this at all have analog VGA out, and you have to have a chip that can lock up to it, and extract the video from that analog signal cleanly. This is, to quote the Jargon file, decidedly non-trivial to do well. That's the reason why a single port unit, not on sale, is generally around $400. If it was DVI/HDMI *only*, it could be substantially cheaper, but I've never seen one that was. Cheers, - jra -- Jay R. Ashworth Baylink jra@baylink.com Designer The Things I Think RFC 2100 Ashworth & Associates http://baylink.pitas.com 2000 Land Rover DII St Petersburg FL USA http://photo.imageinc.us +1 727 647 1274