Mimo UM-720S

Pros: Works as a good 3rd monitor for the small sutff. Runs off of a USB hub if you run out of USB ports. Its easy to set up on Windows as you just pop in a cd.

Cons: sucks to set up on a mac takes a little reading to find the correct drivers and then you have to use it with a USB Hub. Doesn't work as a "touch screen" as it is a mouse controller; and a poor one at that. The website is poorly laid out as well.

Summary: I was sooooooo excited to receive this little thing in the mail. I had big things in mind for this. Well, don't be fooled by this thing, keep it small. I was hoping to use this "touchscreen" external USB monitor with ProTools' mix window and actually touch the faders. NOPE! I was robbed. This device is only a mouse controller and a poor one at that. I did however manage to rig a "touchscreen" set up out of it, but at a great cost. I had to drop my laptops native resolution down to 800x480 and then set it to be a dual screen with the mimo as 2nd. I calibrated it with a stylus pen with 25 points of calibration 3 times to finally get some accuracy at out of it. I did a small mix within ProTools with this set up, but had limited visibility. Most other applications I tried this with could not viably support the small resolution.

Photoshop was cool however. If I didn't try to select the objects in the toolbars I drug over to the mimo with my fingers it was kind o neat to have all of that stuff neatly put away on a 7" display. Too bad I could really only place a few toolbars over there. The most frustrating part about this thing just has to be the size.

If you think that sounds bad let me tell you about set up. So I read when purchasing the monitor that I would need Mac drivers separately purchased from a 3rd party so I figured I'd give them a shot. Too bad they were only the mouse controller driver for 30.00$!!!!!! unrefunded!!!!!! I had to dig through the poorly organized mimomonitors.com to find a link to the forums and then a link to the download within the forums. I got this thing working after two days of setup due to all of the misleading information. It should be straight forward when you are purchasing a product, you shouldn't have to dig for drivers and such. Windows set up was pretty straight forward. Pop in the CD, follow instructions, badda bing badda boom. Simple setup on one system compared to the other was frustrating especially since the Mac is my primary platform.

I wouldn't recommend anybody get this thing for special purposes. It has one purpose and one purpose only; to be an external app monitor and a be a money pit.