Today at my day-job, we were experimenting with a few problems we were trying to tackle with the iPad, and the crazy idea came up to try the new iPhone 4 with our iPad VGA Adapter. We hooked it up, and sure enough, before long we were projecting full Youtube videos up on the big screen. It turns out, with some limitations, the iPhone 4 supports the iPad VGA Adaptor, and with the amazing Retina display it looks great on the big screen.
The Youtube videos we tried were sub-par and grainy on a larger screen (they are on the Retina display as well). I assume that’s because they weren’t formatted correctly. So I decided to try some video we shot with the iPhone 4’s 720p, 30 fps video camera. Sure enough, the video comes up in amazing HD quality, with practically no loss in resolution. In fact, the video almost looked better on the big screen than it did on my iPhone!
There are some caveats. It looks as though only video and photo slideshows work with the VGA dongle. With the iPad, the web browser and Keynote and select applications are supposed to work. On the iPhone, of course there is no full version of Keynote like the iPad so I couldn’t try that (although that would be nice), but I did try the web browser and nothing came up on the screen. However, I did try video within a couple apps, and whenever the video played it showed up on the big screen.
So if you’re looking for a great video device in a small package, the iPhone 4 has even one more piece of goodness to bestow amongst its passionate users. I wrote about the iPad being the monitor you can take anywhere. Well, it very well could be your iPhone powering that monitor in the future.
Just to show it in action, I made this video, showing how simple it is:
