What is WiDi?

The world is truly becoming wireless, not only between base stations but within components around your personal work area as demonstrated by Intel at CES 2010. It was a solution we had more than a year ago but it was expensive, said Shmuel Mooly Eden, vice president and general manager, PC Client Group at Intel Corporation. “So now we integrated this technology on the client side—you can now stream video from your notebook directly to an external display wirelessly.

This new wireless technology, which Intel dubbed as Wireless Display or WiDi, coincided with the announcement of Intel’s latest line of 32-nanometer “Westmere” processors, namely: Core i7, i5, and i3, launched at the world’s biggest technology showcase held at the Las Vegas Convention Center in January.

Although, at last year’s Computex in Taipei, Intel already announced the availability of My WiFi technology, where consumers can now connect their Intel Core-powered computers with devices such as printers, digital cameras, digital music players and other My WiFi-enabled digital devices wirelessly using the popular WiFi standard.

However, with WiDi, this new technology, which Intel hopes to become another industry standard similar to WiFi, would provide wireless connection between a desktop or notebook computer over HDMI to an HDTV also using the 802.11n wireless standard.

“There will be a lot of innovations in this area,” said Eden. “Imagine, getting rid of thick, heavy and long audio and video cables between these components —it makes good sense.”

Intel WiDi technology is now available from Core-powered computers sold by PC companies including Dell, Sony and Toshiba, together with WiDi adaptor products from Netgear.

“Everything needs to be wireless and we need to establish a standard,” said Eden. “You don’t buy a notebook without WiFi —wireless technology it’s inevitable”