The Official Palm Blog states that Windows has released a beta version of SideShow for Treo devices running Windows Mobile 5 or 6. SideShow allows your smartphone to act as another display device to your computer and to control its applications such as Windows Media player, PowerPoint and others. SideShow uses bluetooth between your smartphone and the computer.

The Windows SideShow blog mentions a couple of neat uses of the software - the ability to use your smartphone to control a PowerPoint presentation while viewing the speaker notes, or using it as a remote control for Windows Media Player.

Microsoft has enabled managed APIs via their SDK, so the hope is that developers will jump on board and write some cool new software using this feature.

Our friends over at WMExperts previewed this software earlier this month, including a link to a nice set of screenshots.

---