If you want to find one for yourself, you can use this link
Been awhile, but we’re back, today we have a new piece that I’ve been using since December of ’22, and it’s a dock from Anker connecting via USB-C and really have had little to complain about. On the old scale would’ve been a 1 for overall grump factor, I have 1 gripe, and it’s to do with the HDMI port, we’ll get to that later though.
As somewhat of a snob about peripherals, liking my different mice and keyboards, I’ll definitely say that something like this gives the expandability and to a certain degree, portability to my setups. I don’t have to worry about a lack of ports, long as I have a USB-C port to spare, I’m golden. It even has power delivery, though I’ll get to that later about caveats that you’ll need to know.
For portability this dongle/dock it gets a 9/10 with 10 being perfect the only caveat(s) here are you do have to be somewhat careful with connecting the HDMI port as there’s some USB-C ports that aren’t to the right spec, that it’ll still work on, and still do things like deliver power, but won’t do USB-C display out to the HDMI which does limit that functionality, but it just depends from device to device, and I do believe the spec has to be USB 3.0 or higher (and as a note USB-C does not default to 3.0 so refer to your device) but if it supports the HDMI you can easily get that 2nd screen going without a fight.
As far as power delivery, it says up to 85W, but you do have to have quite the powerful charger and cable to deliver that kind of power, and you’re likely not to get as much out of the dock itself so keep that in mind before you use this to charge, and deliver ports/screen
Tends to heat up a tiny bit if you use it for long hours, but never so much you can’t touch it and from my experiences so far it’d probably take an excessive amount of use at full capacity across all ports to get into the “would cause damage to itself and you if it got this hot”
Speaking of ports we’ve got 2 USB-C 1 with power delivery in, 2 USB-A, A standard SD and Micro SD card reader, and a USB-C port running at 5gbs, all next to a single HDMI port which like I said it’s use will be somewhat determined by your USB ports and I believe the HDMI standard but you can see many questions answered on the listing itself which could be helpful here too. Below I’ve dropped some images of the dock to help you get an idea of dimensions and design.
the dock itself is about just over 4 inches (close to 11 cm) and the overall length with cable is about 1 foot (close to 30cm)
with just under half an an inch in depth and 2 inches wide (about 1 cm deep and 5 cm wide)
Overall if you’d like to get a simple dongle/dock to get you a little more connectivity on anything from a pc all the way down to a phone with USB-C then you’ve got a decent product here that will serve you well, it’s portable and can be used with or without additional power which makes for a great mobile device companion if you need it. I’ve tested it out on a Chromebook Duo, my Note20 Ultra, multiple laptops and a desktop, and it’s done quite well across the board with noted issues with my USB-C on a laptop and my desktop which weren’t compatible with USB 3.0
