MIMO UM-730 USB 7″ LCD Monitor – iPhone Developer Solution

By Aaron Fothergill | February 14th, 2009 | Category: Reviews

Taking a Gamble

The MIMO UM-730 monitor is one of a small series of 7” LCD screens that have recently been made available outside of Korea, where the 750 variant (with built in TV tuner!) has been on sale for a while. The range includes the 710 and 730 in the UK and the 730 and 740 (which has touchscreen capability) in the US. For once, we’ve had them in the UK before our American cousins have been able to buy them, so I bought myself a UM-730 this week when I saw it available online. Why would I consider buying a mere 7” LCD screen though you might wonder? Well, I was intrigued by the fact that it’s a DisplayLink monitor, which means you can plug it in over USB 2 on any modern Mac with a free driver and run it as an extra display, even if you’ve already maxed out your normal display connections or you’re using a Mac mini that only supports a single display. I was also taking a gamble that it might be a good enough display to run the iPhone simulator in its own screen.

First Impressions

The display arrived a couple of days ago. The packaging is pretty good, if not entirely eco-friendly and the display includes its stand, a special double USB lead (more on that later), audio cables, manual and a PC installation CD. The CD being Windows-only isn’t a major problem for us Mac users as it has the website (www.mimo.bz) prominently displayed and points out that you can download the latest drivers from there (which Windows users would probably have to do anyway). If anything, they probably don’t need to include the CD at all, other than possibly to cover the problem of really stupid people who complain if they don’t get a CD with out of date drivers with their hardware.

Build quality of the display is rather good. It’s nicely designed, with the display casing being shiny black plastic and the metal base and stand being nice and solid and with enough weight to make the whole thing sit nicely on the desk. The bezel isn’t the thinnest ever, but it’s not over thick around the screen and the overall thickness of the display certainly isn’t a problem.

After leaving the display to acclimatize to room temperature for 30 minutes (you should always do this with any new hardware. Helps avoid condensation build up) I plugged everything into my MacBook 2.4GHz to test it out. The UM-730 is entirely USB powered, so the only connection it needed was the supplied USB lead. In this case it’s an odd lead with two USB-A plugs to connect to the Mac. At first I thought it used one plug for the display and the other for the built in webcam, but after unplugging the second one, the webcam still worked. So I’m guessing it’s some sort of sneaky kludge for PCs with low powered USB ports and I can happily ignore it.

Slightly annoyingly, the built in microphone doesn’t connect over the webcam’s USB connection and requires one of the supplied audio leads to hook it up to your Mac’s audio in. Not dramatically important as I suspect most Mac users will already have a built in Microphone anyway.

Performance on the Mac and the iPhone Simulator

Once the DisplayLink drivers were installed and the monitor was connected, everything was automatic. It just shows up as another screen on Mac OS X (as it should) and I was able to set it up to go alongside my MacBook’s internal display and the DVI display I have hooked up as my second screen. Color looks good on the display and the initial ‘wave a window around’ test worked fine. The actual resolution of the UM-730 is 800×480 or, 480×800 as it can be rotated from landscape to portrait mode. It doesn’t auto-detect this though, so that does involve you using the rotate option in Screen Setup. Then again it’s only a £99 screen.

The acid test for me though was whether I could run the iPhone devkit’s simulator in it, so I fired up my current SlotZ Racer project, set it to simulator and hit build & run. I was very pleased when it displayed (the iPhone simulator fits nicely in the display area) and even more pleased when it ran at what seems to be a decent frame rate. Happily coping with the 30FPS refresh of SlotZ Racer and being quite playable.

The Verdict — Mot-jin!

From the standpoint of iPhone development this is a major selling point of this screen. It’s entirely USB powered and driven and just plugs into a MacBook with no fuss. So for a pretty minimal outlay (£98 in the UK, $129/$169 in the US) you can put the simulator in its own screen, leaving the main display for debug output. I also tested the screen with video from iTunes and it coped with that quite happily, so it would appear to be a good general side screen. The only thing it didn’t work on was iMovie. As the DisplayLink driver isn’t a Quartz Extreme one, iMovie won’t start up with the display connected. Being USB, it’s easy enough to just unplug it while using iMovie and plug it in again afterwards.

It wouldn’t be much use for playing arcade games or hi-def movies on, but as it’s about the size of a seat-back TV on an airliner economy seat, I wouldn’t expect this anyway. The drivers aren’t perfect yet. They’re not far off, but I can get my Bluetooth mouse to get stuck sometimes if it happens to be in the 730’s screen area when the display sleeps. Sometimes it’s fixed by Command-Tabbing between apps, other times I have to unplug and plug the display in to recover it. Not a deal killer by any means compared to the positives.

As far as the screen’s other features are concerned, the webcam is a 1.3 megapixel one. Works fine in iChat (most do) and is a little darker than the one built into the MacBook, but has a wider field of view. The 730 has touch controls for power and brightness and that’s about it. You have a microphone output and headphone passthrough (so you can use the 2nd mini-jack lead to hook your Mac’s headphone out to the display and plug your headphones into it). There’s also a DC power input, but the manual tells you that this is for servicing only, so ignore it :)

The UM-710 screen that’s also available is oddly 50p (75 cents) more expensive in the UK, despite having fewer features. It doesn’t have the webcam or microphone and has physical buttons for brightness. I suspect the price oddness is just a glitch in Scan’s pricing however as the 730 was the only one in stock when I ordered mine. In the US the UM-710 is $129 vs the UM-730’s $169. There’s also a UM-740 that will be available in the US for $199 that has touchscreen input, but that’s an extra $30 3rd party driver for Mac users and it’s not multi-touch. If it was it would be an absolute no-brainer for iPhone devs.

Recommended for iPhone Developers

In conclusion, I’m very impressed. You could buy a 17” or even 19” LCD display for the same price, but you wouldn’t be able to hook it up as a second screen on a Mac mini or a 3rd (or 4th!) screen on a MacBook or MacBook Pro. Its compact size means it can be plonked almost anywhere on your desk and as it fixes to its stand by a simple screw in dial on the back, it would be trivial to fix it to another stand if you wanted to fix it over the top of your display, inset in a fixed console etc.

Apart from the minor glitch I mentioned above, it works pretty flawlessly and if your an iPhone developer, especially if you’re working using a Mac mini or MacBook, then I can heartily recommend getting one.