HTC are having a great time at the moment. It seems like every handset they launch is a winner, with the HTC Desire and HTC Desire HD proving to be incredibly popular.
Both versions of the Desire are great for both taking and looking at photos, recording videos and watching movies, but what if you want to watch your content on your HDTV at home?
The traditional way of doing it would be to transfer your media to your Mac/PC and then burn your video to dvd to play it back, but that’s such a long winded and slow process no-one really bothers.
HTC Media Link
Thankfully though, technology has moved on and HTC have brought out their tiny Media Link DLNA adapter that allows you to stream music, pictures and videos from your phone to your TV wirelessly. What’s more, as DNLA is a fairly common standard, it will also work with most other brands of phone that support DLNA as well as a number of laptops and cameras, although compatibility will vary from device to device.
If you’ve never come across the term DLNA before, you might want to have a quick look at our post on What Is DLNA? as this explains what it is and why you’ll want it!
Footprint is not much bigger than a bank card
In a way, the Media link adapter is similar to the latest Apple TV. It allows you to play content from around your house or from your phone, without having to mess around with plugging your gadgets into your TV. Simply power it up, connect it via HDMI to your TV and away you go. There’s no support for streaming from websites, not yet anyway, but as the HTC Media Link is running Android it might appear in a future update.
The HTC Media link connects quickly and easily to your existing wireless network, and all the set up is done through your PC. All you need to know is the name of your network and the password and you’ll be up and running in less than 5 minutes. All you need to do then is make sure your phone is on the same network, launch the Connected Media app, find the photos, videos or music you want to play back and hit play. Your content will then be displayed on the screen.
Engadget recently reviewed the HTC Media Link, here’s a quick video from them testing it out with the HTC Desire Z.
You can read their full review of the Media Link on the Engadget site. For more details, head over to the HTC Media Link product page.