One of the most interesting aspects of MHL in my opinion is that MHL enables your Smartphone to run your PC/Desktop/Laptop experience. Now Acer is showing their Acer Extend prototype where it’s an “empty” good looking laptop shell as stylish as an Ultrabook, which only contains the display, battery, keyboard, mousepad and basic MHL support electronics, thus potentially being sold at a very cheap price, then you power that Laptop Dock with your Phone, in the similar way to the Motorola LapDock system of a couple of years ago. MediaTek is showing some Android software optimizations that they are doing to run this setup on their Octa Core MT6592 processor, thus switching the Android UI to a more Laptop-friendly orientation and configuration when the MHL connectivity to the Laptop Dock is triggered. Hopefully that Android 5 will feature optimized MHL functionality also, perhaps even enabling to instantly switch to a full Chrome OS like productivity state when the MHL to Laptop Dock is detected. MHL also demonstrates a couple of important HDMI sticks from Dell and from Roku which feature MHL support, making HDMI Sticks easy to use and clutter-free, automatically powered by the TV itself and running the full Productivity Suite or the Entertainment Functions directly on the HDMI Stick. Now with MHL 3.0, MHL supports up to 600mbit/s on the USB Host direction, something that I have been looking forward to since I started video-blogging about MHL in 2011. The potential here is to accelerate the adoption of ARM Devices for powering productivity.
MHL for Productivity, Acer Extend, MediaTek MT6592 MHL Optimizations and Dell/Roku MHL HDMI Sticks
Posted by – February 28, 2014
