Hello everyone. OK, today we're taking a look at the KiDiGi
HDMI Dock.
Now, this dock
just take the Samsung Galaxy 4 out of there
it's a fairly standard dock in the sense that it has a
micro usb connector there but where it becomes slightly more interesting is on
the back.
Not only does it have an in power
so you can plug in your micro usb cable there
but it has a HDMI out.
This is basically an MHL compliant dock.
So it works not just with a Galaxy S4 but also with Galaxy S3 as well and I'm afraid
it is too small for the Galaxy Note 2 but it is nice that Samsung didn't change
anything on the Galaxy S4 which means that from a point of view of the
connection on the bottom MHL works absolutely fine. This is MHL One so
it does still require its own separate power
but you plug it in, just drop it straight onto the dock like that
plug your cables into the back
and there you go. Your picture is up on your HDMI device be it a television set
or a monitor.
We'll show you how that works in a moment but one thing I do want to just say is
that due to the way that Samsung have kind of
gone about things
with their screen rotation settings you'll have to download a separate
application if you want to get the best from this particular
method because obviously the device is going to be in a portrait like that but
actually what we want on our monitor is landscape.
Now if you try and do this with the screen rotation option
it won't work very well because as soon as you have the screen rotation set
it will allow you to turn it to landscape, turn the screen rotation off and it flips straight back
to portrait again
rendering it a bit useless as a screen rotation tool. Now what I've done is
I've downloaded an application that's free, let me just see if it's made its way onto my home screen
I think it has
Hang on a second, let's just flip that
on.
So the application basically allows you to switch between portrait and landscape
mode quickly and easily
let me just find out exactly
what it was called.
I think it was just called screen rotation lock
in actual fact but it doesn't seem to be there. It's called rotation locker. I'll pop the
app link in the description. But essentially use that pop it into landscape
mode before you dock up and then you won't have any problems it will just simply
go on there and it will stay like that.
So let's show you how this works on a monitor.
OK, so as you can see, there's my monitor, here's my dock and what I'm going to do
is I'm going to plug in the mike first and
plug in some power that's coming off a host usb cable just running off the monitor itself in fact
but likewise you could use the adapter that comes in the box quite easily.
Now all we need to do is
plug that in there
and then
flip over this monitor into
the right source.
And what we should have
is our Galaxy S4 now running beautifully
as you can see there
on the monitor.
There you go, so there's the Galaxy S4
there's the monitor and as you can see it's all working very nicely from the dock.
Now you could use this as a really neat method
for making sure
your Galaxy S4 is nicely composed on your desk it's not going to get knocked or
anything dropped on it and then obviously being able to project that directly onto a
television or a monitor.
Now what you can do from here, because the dock is slightly limited it doesn't have
a separate set of usbs or anything like that so you can plug in your usb keyboard
and mouse or joystick
you'll have to use Bluetooth if you want to get a
remote desktop environment kind of feel going on
So for instance if we were to use a Bluetooth keyboard and mouse we would now be
able to interact directly with the Galaxy S4
just like a normal computer would
so in that kind of arrangement we could then play
computer games using
the keyboard and mouse
if we have something like a Mogo we could use the Mogo to interact directly over Bluetooth
as a game controller
and again everything is being projected to this 1080p screen
The KiDiGi
desktop hub
it's a fantastic little device actually for the price
it does a really really good job and it's really solidly made.
It doesn't rock from side to side or anything like that and as you can see
when it's sat on your desk
it does actually look
really rather fetching