Ever Thought of having multiple monitors on your desk. Having multiple monitors has several advantages and disadvantages at the same time. Well we will start with the advantage part, having multiple monitors will increase your productivity, almost every designer, video editor, content creator, and software developer uses more than one monitor because of this reason.
Flipping back and forth between softwares like photoshop and illustrator or from one IDE to another is a headache. At the same time having a second monitor can make things a lot easy for us to use different softwares at the same time.
Disadvantages are very few, and that only depends on your computer. If your computer doesn’t have a graphics card you can face some problems while installing them. The thing is the resources of video card gets divided between either of the monitors and if you will run software’s which takes up all of your resources you will most likely face the problem like lack of performance and it will ruin all the fun of having multiple monitors.
So I’ll suggest before investing money on a monitor just check what kind of resources you have on your PC. For testing purposes, you can use your smartphones or Tablet as your secondary monitor. Here is the list of best secondary monitor apps for Android and iOS devices.
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Using the phone as Secondary Monitor
Smartphones come with a bunch of features that are really handy from time to time. You can do almost everything, we can use our smartphones as projectors, we can mirror our phone’s screen and we can also use our smartphone as a secondary monitor.
To do so, you just need to install a second monitor app on your smartphone and their clients on your desktop (and also the required drivers to make it work properly). Then we just need to connect our Android device to the desktop using a USB cable or WiFi (they must be on the same network).
1. Spacedesk
Spacedesk is a popular choice for transforming your Android device into a secondary monitor for your windows pc. We can connect our pc and smartphone using USB, WiFi, or LAN. The resolution is really decent and you can also interact with the second screen.
To get started, we need to install the necessary drivers on your Windows PC. Once done, you just need to launch the app and it will automatically detect and displays the available Desktops on the same network that has drivers installed.
Once you found your PC just tap on connect. So, just open the space desk app on android and connect, the app will automatically detect the IP address and the name of your system.
To use your tablet or android as an extended display/monitor, we just need to configure the secondary display option in windows. To do that, just go to the Control Panel and then Display Settings then Select Extend These Displays and click OK. You should now be able to use your Android as an extended monitor.
Spacedesk will work fine if you don’t want your phone to be bounded by a USB cable. But that’s the only problem with this, though it also works wirelessly, there is a chance that you can face numerous amount of lag.
Supported Medium: LAN, Wi-Fi, USB
Download Spacedesk (free)
Read: How to Use Your Android Phone as Wireless Computer Speakers
2. Splashtop Wired XDisplay
Splashtop only allows you to connect via USB. Since you are connected through a wired medium, you have a bright side that you will get a better resolution and frame rate than the Wireless medium. The mirroring quality is in HD with 60 FPS.
Splashtop works on all major platforms like Mac, Windows, Android, and iOS. It uses wired medium over wireless because Splashtop offers a more and responsive and real-time experience.
Splashtop is free and can be installed through the respective app stores.
Download Splashtop Wired XDisplay (Free)
3. Chrome Remote desktop
We all have used Microsoft remote desktop, it allows you to control your computer using your Android device. Chrome Remote desktop does something similar but it also allows you to mirror your Android smartphone on your PC.
Like every Google product, it is easy to use and easy to set up, the only requirement is a Google account. The only one disadvantage with this tool is you cant use different apps on both the screen, this means you won’t be able to multi-task on the secondary display.
Google Remote Desktop is free and works seamlessly with any device.
Download Google Remote Desktop (free)
4. iDisplay
iDisplay lets you use your smartphone’s display to its full potential. At first, it was only available for iOS devices, but now, you can use it on all major platforms. It is available on both Windows and Android which makes it a good cross-platform solution for Screen mirroring. It supports multi-touch functionality and can mirror your phone with Full HD resolution.
It supports LAN, Wi-Fi, and USB (USB is not available for Android yet).
Download iDisplay ($18)
These were some of the best options for using your smartphones as a secondary display.
