For many years now, Microsoft has released software to developers of Windows Mobile programs which will let you see your Devices screen on your desktop. Although it was designed for developers, it is available for free to everyone. This is another of Microsoft’s powertoys and it was released in 2003. Specifically we want to look at the Activesync Remote Display component. This works through ActiveSync via USB or Bluetooth, or without Activesync via WiFi.

With Activesync Remote Display, we could show our PDA screen on a laptop screen, then connect a projector for a presentation. We could play our devices games from our desktop or plan our next trip in our GPS software. We can use our keyboard and mouse to enter the data which is much faster than using our devices tiny keyboard, even with the minor delay in refreshing the display.

While these are mostly not very practical for everyday use, if we combine it with a few tricks from Inspect My Gadget and a bluetooth headset, you can choose to to leave your phone in the drawer and remain connected.

Check out “Use your computer to receive your mobile phone calls via the hands-free/headset profile using bluetooth (WM5)”, geez that’s a long title. This will let you know who is calling you. You can dial any numbers from the remote display on your computer using you keyboard and mouse, and then do all your talking through the headset.

This will diminish your devices batteries fairly fast because we need to keep the our device screen active, and our connection (bluetooth or wifi) continually running. If it is docked to charge you will be fine, if you are not docked, you should still get a days use out of it. The software is a little buggy on my Ipaq rw6828, but it does work much better than Microsoft’s previous version and is quite usable.

Installation is not as straightforward as we usually like as there is data to be installed on both your PC and Device. Get the msi (Microsoft installer) file from Microsoft. Download the file onto your computer and install the program. You then need to know your devices chip type, find the corresponding file and copy that to your device.