Two Thumbs Down For Microsoft’s Wireless Display Adapter

My experience with Microsoft’s new Wireless Display Adapter was an abject failure – nothing but confusion, complications and disappointment. My happiest moment in this whole sorry episode was taking it to the UPS store to return it to Microsoft for a full $59 refund. In theory this little gadget was supposed to stream what was on a smartphone, tablet or laptop to a HDTV, much like Apple TV, Chromecast and Roku only without having to connect to Wi-Fi. The non-Wi-Fi is the part that interested me.

In theory a great idea – in practice not so much!

Despite 2 or 3 hours of troubleshooting using my iPhone, iPad and Windows 8.1 laptop on 2 different TV’s the closest I ever got was a totally useless display on my TV telling me the adapter was “ready to connect”.  That looked good at first until I realized that there was no way possible that I could find to use any of the devices to actually connect to the gizmo plugged into my TV!

Apple TV, Roku and Chromecast are still the best options

Save your money and your patience by sticking with proven streaming devices like Apple TV, Roku and Chromecast. Each of those are very easy to setup and work well with Apple TV, in my opinion, being the best but the most costly option.

I first wrote about Microsoft’s new Wireless Display Adapter back in my blog of September 24th and was anxiously waiting for its availability date of Oct. 31st. It’s not like I needed another one of these gizmos as I already own and am very happy with both my Apple TV and Google Chromecast. The Microsoft device, however, was different because it was the only one where it was said you didn’t need to connect to a local Wi-Fi to use it. Instead, it uses Near Field Communications (NFC) that works up to 23 ft to project from a Miracast enabled device to the Microsoft Adapter.

I’ll just start from the beginning and try to briefly explain what happened. I plugged the adapter into our TV’s USB and HDMI ports as per the few instructions that came with it. After making sure the TV input was set to HDMI 2 I saw the adapter show up on my TV screen and I figured “hey, this is way too easy”.  Unfortunately, I was right, it was way too easy and that’s as far as I ever got with this thing.

It would appear from this that it only works with Surface and Android

After trying everything I could think of to connect my iPhone or iPad I searched on Google only to find out that Apple devices are not compatible with Miracast. Great! How did I ever miss that? Apparently, it only works with Android smartphones and tablets. That figures. Why would Apple, Google and Microsoft ever make a device that’s cross-compatible and simple?  The ads and reviews I read before buying this adapter never mentioned anything about not working with Apple devices.

Google Chromecast works well with my iPhone, iPad and Windows 8.1 laptop

Still hopeful, I knew that Microsoft said that Windows 8.1 was Miracast enabled so I was sure my Dell Windows 8.1 configured laptop would work. No such luck as I got no further with it than with my Apple devices. I signed on to talk to Microsoft Support via a chat line only to discover I knew more about this device after working with it for a few hours than he did.  He was completely unaware until I told him and he double-checked that their adapter was not compatible with Apple devices.

What did work out well with Microsoft was their return procedures. It was simple as they sent me a prepaid UPS postage address label, via email, and all I had to do was put it in a bubble-wrap envelope, tape the label on and drop it off at our local UPS store. The good news is that now I still have $59 in my gizmo/gadget account for the next new, improved device that will no doubt appear soon.

Thanks for visiting!