How smart is smart?

Your desktop computer is up in the home office, but you'd really rather delete your spam with one eye on the big living-room . Wouldn't it be wonderful if you could run your favorite programs remotely from a slim device you could carry anywhere in the house? That's more or less the premise behind ViewSonic's Airpanel V110, the first incarnation of the technology Microsoft has dubbed Windows Powered Smart Displays. Smart? For a display, yes, but …

…Airpanel to run a Windows XP Pro machine remotely; thanks to a feature called Remote Desktop, just about any networked Windows PC can do it. So why pay notebook prices for a dumb Smart Display? More models are in the works from ViewSonic, Philips and others, but as recent PDAs confirm, a computer without a keyboard is like a car without a steering wheel. Bury this overpriced mistake in the crowded graveyard of internet appliances.