According to industrial designer Oscar Diaz, despite the performance and display capabilities of today’s tablets, many are underused when sitting idle on the desktop. Frankly, we couldn’t agree more.
The London-based designer, who set up his own practice shortly after graduating from the Royal College of Art in London in 2006, set out to create a solution for making tablets more useful.
Says Diaz:
“We realized that we use our tablets for drawing, reading or sending e-mails on the go, but when we are at the office or at home sitting at our desk, we put them aside as is always more comfortable to work using a large display. Why not make it easy and affordable to actually use your tablet as a second screen?”
After months of iterating on a viable solution that would work across all makes and models of tablets and displays, the solution came in the form of PIXO, a tablet mount that increases your display real estate with regard to the existing industrial design of your tablet and monitor. When used with third-party apps (Duet Display, Air Display, or iDisplay), the tablet(s) can expand your existing display or simply just serve as a mount for multi-tasking with native tablet apps in the same field-of-view:
While this isn’t the first time we’ve seen a tablet mount for displays, the low cost ($50 or $36 for Kickstarter campaign supporters) and simple magnetic connection mechanism – not to mention its ability to be compatible with nearly any tablet – certainly makes the PIXO one of the best contenders we’ve seen yet. Finally, when it’s time to take the tablet on-the-go, the unhinged tablet disconnects from the mount near-seamlessly.
“We have done a ton of prototypes and tested different methods to attach the tablet,” explains Diaz. “At the end we decided on magnets as it allows more flexibility in terms of sizes and tablet models. As tablets are getting thinner and lighter the task was to design a mount that could accommodate different sizes and thickness. Having just a sticker on the back allowed us to do that.”
Early campaign supporters have until May 18th to get theirs for just $36 over at Kickstarter.
