Apple, please create an Apple TV for the conference room

You can’t go a day or two without seeing a story speculating on the iPhone 5, which I’m certain will not see the light of day this fall. Apple will instead offer an iPhone 4S (or some other 4-based name), a faster, perhaps thinner version of the iPhone 4. But what you almost never hear about is Apple TV, the $99 black box that connects not just the Internet to your TV, such as to rent movies or stream videos, but also streams content from your iPad or iPhone.

In the forthcoming iOS 5, you’ll be able to wirelessly mirror your iPad 2’s display to an HDTV via the Apple TV, or so Apple has announced. The iPad 2 could previously wirelessly send music and video to the Apple TV, but in iOS 5, you’ll be able to stream presentations, your browser’s screens — anything, in fact, that’s on your iPad’s screen.

Imagine what this will do for presentations. You can walk the stage with your iPad or have it at the podium and carry off live presentations complete with application demonstrations and Web pages — but only if your display or projector has an HDMI port. (HDMI-to-VGA cables won’t work, as you need a digital-to-analog converter box as well.) And there has to be a wireless LAN in the conference room for the iPad and Apple TV to connect through; unlike a Mac, the Apple TV and iPad can act only as Wi-Fi clients, not as ad hoc access points. In most facilities, these two conditions don’t hold — so my presentation fantasy remains just a fantasy.

Sure, you can physically connect your iPad to a projector or screen using a VGA adapter cable or HDMI cable, but that limits your mobility on stage. I’ve more than once walked a bit too far from the podium, causing the adapter cable to unplug from the projector. It’s true that for Keynote slideshows, you can freely walk around the stage or room if you get the $1 Keynote Remote app, which allows your iPhone or iPod Touch to control the iPad tethered to the display or projector via Bluetooth or Wi-Fi. However, you can show only Keynote presentations — nothing else.

What we really need from Apple is the Apple TV Conference Edition. That enhanced Apple TV would have two capabilities the regular Apple TV does not: a VGA port (or a DVI port or DisplayPort with which you could use any of the widely available VGA adapters) and a built-in Wi-Fi access point.

The Apple TV Conference Edition would retain the HDMI port of the regular Apple TV, so it would support both new display equipment that uses HDMI as well as the ubiquitous VGA port in pretty much all projectors and existing conference displays.

The built-in Wi-Fi access point would create a Wi-Fi network in the conference room — at least in the presenter’s area — so you could guarantee a connection between the iPad and Apple TV. Many conference halls don’t have Wi-Fi networks in place or ones you can count on. And in corporate conference rooms, having a separate Wi-Fi local network would allow anyone to present without giving them access to the corporate network. It would be used just for the presentation equipment.

If Apple were to make the Apple TV Conference Edition, I beleve it would sell like hotcakes to both businesses and conference facilities. Individual presenters like me would likely buy them as well, because the Apple TV is so small, light, and easy to carry. The regular Apple TV costs $99, so the Apple TV Conference Edition should cost no more than $149. Such a price too would help it quickly become standard equipment in meeting rooms and conference halls throughout the world.

Apple, please get cracking! iOS 5 is just a few weeks away by all accounts. It’d be great if you could announce it when you reveal the iPhone 4S, release iOS 5, and update the iPod Touch and perhaps other iPods this fall as we all expect. Whenever you announce it, please try to have the Apple TV Conference Edition for sale in early 2012, so it’s available for the 2012 conference season that gets into high gear this spring. We’d all be so grateful, and you could show once again that you play both sides of the business/consumer divide.

This article, “Apple, please create an Apple TV for the conference room,” was originally published at InfoWorld.com. Read more of Galen Gruman’s Mobile Edge blog and follow the latest developments in mobile technology at InfoWorld.com. Follow Galen’s mobile musings on Twitter at MobileGalen. For the latest business technology news, follow InfoWorld.com on Twitter.