I was asking myself how if I could use a PDA or iPod for presentations instead of a laptop and came across some articles like HOW-TO: Put PowerPoint on your iPod Photo from Engadget. The idea is that you export your presentation as a series of photos which can then be played out as video to a monitor or video project. (Note that they don’t go out as data.)
I was wondering about this reading about the now discontinued Margi Presenter-To-Go that works with the Palm line. They provide cables and stuff so you can run a data projector from a Palm PDA with enough memory. Alas they have given up on this. Will an iPod Touch version come along?
I used to use the Margi system and it was indeed a pity to see it go south. It worked very well on both my old iPaq and with the Palm. I remember recommending to a colleague two years ago and she could still pick up discontinued packages through Amazon.
I was very surprised that there didn\’t appear to be a market for this with the Palm and PocketPC. Seems a natural, although Keynote/PPt might pre-empt this.
To be honest, the idea of somehow removing any flexibility from a powerpoint presentation leaves me a little uneasy. I recall the suggestion that I could create a presentation in Keynote on a Mac and then save it as QT movie for playback on a PC as being a *good* solution. When giving presentations in the past I cannot remember one where there wasn\’t a follow up question that was best served by being able to go right to a particular slide. Being able to call up the sorter was the *best* solution and having to have paged through slides sequentially in QT if front of an audience seemed like a pretty lame solution. Thus, the idea of saving slides as photos and recalling this sequential paging leaves me wondering about how this solution is more efficient than the slight bulk of the laptop and better presentation control.
I too don’t understand why there isn’t a market. Perhaps people want to edit their slides the night before.
BTW, Mac has a Margi system that you can sign out. That’s how I found out about it.