Terracode - Nanovision MiMo UM-740 Review

Nanovision MiMo UM-740 Review

The Nanovision MiMo UM-740 arrived well packaged. The box containing the monitor was well designed and protected the screen well. I was impressed with the thought that went into the product packaging. The display is housed in a protective plastic container within the box.

The UM-740 is a 7” LCD monitor which is powered fully by the USB connection. There are three models of this monitor: UM-710, UM-730 and UM-740. This review is for the flagship US spec model UM-740.

The UM-740 has the following specifications:

7” widescreen LCD
800 x 480 (WXGA) resolution
Touch Screen
1.3 megapixel Webcam
Microphone
USB bus powered (mini-usb plug)
USB 2.0
DisplayLink technology
Touch controls for on/off and volume.

The box contents:

UM-740 monitor
USB 2.0 cable
Audio cable
Mounting stand
Windows drivers (Mac drivers were not included on the disk, but can be acquired from the retailer.)

Installation:
The UM-740 drivers were installed on a Dell dual processor Intel Quad core PC running Vista Ultimate x64. The UM-740 wasn't listed as a choice and was advised to use the UM-750 drivers. The UM-750 has a DMB tuner which the US models do not have (aka UM-740). The video went out for almost a minute before the computer came back up. The webcam and video drivers installed fine, but the touch drivers were not Vista x64 compatible [EDIT 01/05/09: x64 drivers are now available. Please see link at end of article.].The video, touch and webcam drivers installed fine on a Vista x86 based Toshiba laptop. The laptop didn’t lose video like the desktop. This was a quirk of the PC I have and you may not have the same result. In both events, the DisplayLink driver installed fine.

The driver places a system tray icon on the desktop which allows one to change display orientation, set display mode (extended or mirror desktop and display settings). The display unfortunately isn’t recognized as Windows SideShow device in the Windows SideShow control panel.

The extra display space is great for Photoshop tools. The main display can be used for editing and the brushes, palette, layers, etc can be placed on the smaller screen and selected by touching the display..

Video quality:
Playing a Mpeg2 video was very smooth and looked great on the dual Quad PC. Colors are not as rich as my primary (28") or secondary (10") monitors, but was very watchable. The DisplayLink technology does use quite a bit of resources when playing back video.
Resources used when playing Mpeg2 video on UM740

Resources used when playing same video on primary 28” LCD monitor.

Text Quality:
Text is very readable and crisp on the monitor and could actually be used as a small external monitor for a Ultra Mobile PC (UMPC) with Bluetooth keyboard for a nice mobile package.

Performance:
The video performance on the Dual-Quad PC was very smooth with minimal if any smearing that is seen on LCDs with high response time. Overall the UM-740 worked very well.

The UM-740 was also tested on a Toshiba sub-notebook (R205 series) with a 1.2 GHz Pentium-M and 1.25 GB memory. Disconnecting the USB cable from the desktop after switching off the display causes the primary display to go dark and then come back. The driver took a few seconds to load and configure itself after connecting the display to the laptop . The video on the UM-740 initially showed a bit of flicker. After of bit of use the flicker wasn’t as noticeable.

On the 1.2 GHz Pentium-M notebook, the video had a fairly low frame-rate and was barely watchable. The task manager showed the CPU usage to be between 70 – 100% and no free memory available.

Touch Screen:
The touch screen was a bit tricky to get calibrated since the calibration will show up on the primary monitor and if in mirror mode will pan on the UM-740. This makes it impossible to calibrate.

In order to properly calibrate the touch screen, one needs to go to Windows Display settings and select the UM-740 monitor icon. Check the box ‘This is my main monitor’ and 'Extend the desktop to this monitor'.

The touch screen driver places a system tray icon which allows one to run the calibration, test the calibration and adjust the settings. The Settings selection allows one to select the target monitor. In this case the target monitor was changed to Monitor 2.

When the touch calibration program is run, the software will launch to the UM740 and not to the primary laptop/desktop display. Calibration requires the user to touch 4 points on the screen. This went smoothly.

The UM-740 touch drivers behaved properly with the laptop touchpad drivers and didn't have any ill effects. The touch screen worked very well with Excel and basic applications. Use as a graphic digitizer isn't successful with ones finger, but using a stylus, one can make less crude drawings.

Camera Quality:
The camera is fairly decent and the quality of the image is on par with most basic webcams . It is nice that the UM-740 has a microphone. The display was recognized and worked well with Windows Live Messenger Video calls.

Conclusion:
The UM-740 is a cool little display. At ~$189, it is on the pricey side since one can get a 19" monitor for the same price. For individuals that need a little touch screen for a Car PC, Home Theater PC or special project, this would be a great addition. It also would be perfect for a server display. The drivers do support Windows 2003 for the touch driver and webcam given an initial installation I attempted. I'll be testing the MiMo with Windows Home Server in the near future.

Update:

01/05/08 - Updated Touch drivers supporting 32 and 64 bit XP asnd Vista are now available. You can download the drivers now from TheGadgeteers.com or Nanovision's website.

07/18/09 - DisplayLink drivers prior to v5 should be de-installed prior to install of Windows 7. Pre-release Windows 7 drivers are available on the DisplayLink website at http://www.displaylink.com/support/windows7.html

Updated DisplayLink drivers can be downloaded from DisplayLink.com website.

DisplayLink USB to DVI Adapter review

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