At this year's CES show in Vegas there have been more than a couple of relatively exciting announcements and of course Intel was intent on joining the party.  Today we got to spend some quality time behind closed doors with the folks in Intel's Mobile group learning a bit about some of the new features that will be coming to their Core i5 and Core i3 Mobile platforms in the weeks ahead.  We heard some fairly inspiring things about the technology back in the November time frame at a cozy bistro in New York city but today we were able to see it in action and it was impressive to say the least.

Intel's new WiDi (Wireless Display Interface) technology will start to be bundled with various Core i5 and Core i3 notebooks later this month and it promises to address the Home Theater and Multimedia PC markets with a solution that will enable wireless connectivity of your notebook over HDMI to an HDTV. Using standard 802.11n wireless technologies for transmission of data, Intel describes the product as "a solution that requires a laptop PC based on select Intel Core processors, Intel HD Graphics, and Intel Centrino wireless with Intel MyWiFi Technology enabled. The laptop needs to have Intel Wireless Display software installed and also an adapter featuring Intel Wireless Display is required to receive the signals from the PC that display them on the TV. This adapter is connected to the TV via either HDMI or standard AV cables."

Netgear has stepped out early with a receiver product dubbed Push2TV and their block diagram below lays out the solution for you here...

What was rather refreshing about this announcement was how close the product was to retail roll-out.  It's in fact shipping in a matter of weeks, bundled with select Sony, Toshiba and Dell laptops.  Here we have Intel's Josh Newman demonstrating Intel WiDi technology for us.  Take a look, it's definitely worth a few extra bits of your bandwidth...

Here are a few close-ups of the Sony and Toshiba notebooks we saw today demonstrating Intel WiDi.  Both machines strike a stylish balance of portability and performance; Sony's machine taking ultra-thin design cues while Toshiba's machines was bit with a little more glitz perhaps, depending on your perspective.

We've seen more than a few sites at this year's CES but often times we're left flat with all of the pre-announcements before the show, leaving not as many new things to see live at the show and stealing some thunder from what otherwise would perhaps pique our collective geek interest.  We'd have to say that Intel's Wireless Display Technology demo definitely impressed us more than just about anything we've seen thus far, though we're not quite done yet, if you can believe that.

So we at MediaSignage are really excited to see HDMI wireless becoming main stream. What this means is that soon you will be able to run a Digital Signage network with wireless internet and wireless HDMI screens; can you imagine how simple it will be to integrate a brand new digital signage network into an existing facility. HDMI wireless is great news.

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