For the most part, there is no way to screen share from a stock iPhone, iPad, or Android phone for that matter. You would have to Jail Break an iPhone to get it to do screen sharing or screen recording, and for us lowly researchers, that is not typically a viable option. The same is true for Android phones – unless you can root the phone, there are no options for screen-sharing or recording.

But all is not lost for mobile remote research. The iPad 2 allows for mirroring!! That means you can run a really long HDMI cable out of the iPad 2 and observe and record the screen movements “remotely.” In this case “remotely” means in another room but for mobile research in 2011 that’s about as good as it gets. And this is one of those techniques that will seem pretty silly in a few years, when iOS and other mobile devices do actual screen-sharing. For now, it’s the best game in town.

We can’t wait to try iPad 2 research with the ability to display the screen crystal clear in the next room, because up until now we’ve just been pointing webcams at the screen and live streaming to another room or remote observers. Below is an example of how the mirroring looks on the iPad2.