I went on holiday recently, travelling around Spain. You know holidays - getting away from it all, taking it all in. Not being dragged down by the chains of every day life, such as mobile phones and tabs and what-not?

Well, no actually, I went fully geared up. My trip to Spain was going to involve around 20 hours each way on a plane (Singapore Airlines - if you are going economy, it is the best option) so I needed as much distraction as possible for the flights alone, but generally I wanted to be connected.

This was seen as a rather dubious approach to a vacation by my partner. Though by the end of it she was won over completely. Not least of all that time where we got trapped in a stairwell trying to leave our rental apartment for the airport. The n810 tab found a wifi connection and I was able to Skype the rental agency to get us out - we made the flight

So the first task of getting there was to get a local SIM for 3G. That was pretty easy except for exceeding my Spanish ability quite dramatically. The Vodafone person seemed to enjoy working out what I was going on about anyway.

So with local 3G I am online. My 8Gb SD card packed with movies and shows and music. The internal card filled with ebooks and a Spanish-English dictionary.

I have a female - female adapter so that I can upload my photos to a server as I go, using microSD everywhere now with adapters.

A mini-hub and an external wifi card to do "penetration testing". Also a pocket AP for those places where they only have a wired internet connection.

So I was all set.

Except for one thing. Travelling around, once in a while you need to just lay up. Take a night off from the sights and sounds and just chill. So I had a tab full of movies, and two of us, and a TV.

And no way to play the movies on the TV from the tab. I toyed around with playing the movies from my camera, as I had brought along the AV cables, but no dice... I would need to run a conversion I think - I didn't get to the bottom of it.

So has anyone explored the possibility of using a USB to TV out from a Nokia tab? I don't think it is feasible - but it would be cool to have the tab as a media centre while on the go, as well as everything else.

Multimedia portable hard drives are pretty good. In Singapore on the return trip I found a media player that took a USB mass storage device as input, and had all the necessary stuff in it to play any movies on the usb device out to a TV. It wasn't much smaller than a multi-media hard drive, but I reckon it would get included in my travel kit next time....

I remember seeing it discussed, but I didn't see any progress coming from it. There was a project that got USB to VGA adapters working for the most part... I wish the NITs would have the massive tip/ring/sleeve combination for Y/Pr/Pb (iPods) or at least native composite out.

Most point and shoots seem to create photo JPEG movies, which is what it would probably require to playback.

As far as I know, this is all we've got, and "one update per second" isn't really gonna cut it for watching movies

It shouldn't be THAT difficult for Nokia to do, they've had TV Out on their high end phones since 2006, and they're now including TV Out on their mid-range phones too like the 6220 and 6500 Slide. Both of those phones cost less than the N810.

I think someone said that there's a chip in the N800 and N810 which is the same chip used to provide TV Out on the N95 smartphone, so in theory the tablets already have TV Out hardware, but it's not connected to anything.

I'd prefer actual TV output instead of VGA because it's quite tricky to find computer monitors when you're out and about. Practically all TV sets (even older models) are compatible with composite or SCART, so they'd all work with TV Out that used composite.

If you're stuck in a hotel, they're unlikely to have a VGA monitor or TV with monitor input.

it has been my experience that alot of tvs in hotels at least in the usa don't have composite inputs, probably to persuade people to buy movies instead of plugging in their portable dvd players.

it sure is a nice option when they do have it, and i've used my n95 to watch southparks and movies, even surf the web along with a bluetooth keyboard.

hopefully the new NIT will have it built in.

Yeah, VGA out would be less useful in this scenario imo - but probably useful for people doing presentations or whatever - though video-out would suffice in both situations I think, given that most projectors will take video-in.

Attempting VGA out to use the n810 as a desktop replacement seems a bit of a stretch!

But thats a good point - if my phone supported tv-out, that would be good enough and meant that I didn't have to carry another device. I was planning on getting an n78 but this doesn't support it.

I am trying to get the phone size down as much as possible given that the tab provides the functionality I need that most high end phones provide - but I can't seem to get what I want from a phone without resorting to the n series.

Well, as far as dodging the $$$ N-series, and getting what you want, check Krisse's tip here, and look into numbered S60 devices.

I am contemplating getting this external multimedia adapter [uses the N800 like any other USB storage device]

One of the reasons why the tv out probably has never been even thought for n800/n810 has been that the omap1 and omap2 lcd controllers have been up to 640 rez only->there has been the need for external lcd controller. Now, omap2 at least has tv out on the chip, so it would have been pretty easy to add the tv out. For the epson chip it's not a possibility.

e.g. n95 has tv out. it also has the same processor as n810. Anyway, n95 is pretty nice console all by itself with snes emu and picodrive when used with tv out.(and nice portable one without the tvout)

So when will we hear the result, pleeeeeeeeeeese? And which one did you end up buying the 1 TB is a little bit too big for the tablet ?

bun