Beam them up, Scotty!

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If you’ve gone out and bought yourself, or someone else, a Nokia Lumia, there’s an interesting app (and website) for you.
It’s called PhotoBeamer, and is developed by Nokia. It is a nice way of sharing images on another screen, without the hassle of connecting to that screen physically. Probably the reason for the existence of this service in the first place is the absence of a direct method to connect to another screen using a Lumia, but hey, at least there’s something.
The free app can be downloaded from the Store, and it then accesses your photos. The website, www.photobeamer.com [2] shows you just a giant QR code on a blue background.
Open photobeamer.com on the screen on which you wish to show your images on, and launch the app on your phone. It will ask you to select an image, and it’ll activate your camera and ask you to let it scan the QR code.
Since Lumias have decent cameras, the DSP (Digital Signal Processing) magic that follows is pretty quick; the QR code is decoded into a URL, and the selected image is uploaded over the internet to Nokia’s servers, from where it’s downloaded onto the screen displaying the code. Pretty neat, actually, and it doesn’t take much time at all.
Now simply flick through your photos on your phone and the one on screen will update accordingly. Once you exit the app on your phone, the website should revert to showing a fresh new QR code, if it doesn’t, refresh the page. The control over the screen isn’t as responsive as a direct physical or wireless connection to the screen, but the advantage of this method is that it works on anything that has a web browser and can display a webpage of your choice.
The most significant risk here is that of breach of user privacy, should the PhotoBeamer page be hacked. If it is, Nokia promptly responds and blocks access to the page to minimise damage.