ViewSonic VA1655 15.6" IPS Monitor

I've only had this monitor for about a week, but I've already used it in so many different ways.... I primarily work from home and I like to move around the house throughout my workday. Unfortunately, to be efficient in what I do, I really need at least two screens most of the time. I have two large full-size monitors in my home offiice, but they're bulky and a pain to move around. I recently read an article saying that single-board computer maker OrangePi was releasing a portable monitor and I was intrigued. That lead me to start looking at options. As it turns out, there are a ton of portable monitors on the market, many cheaper than this one, but most of the ones I saw were from no-name manufacturers and I was concerned about their quality. In the end, I narrowed down my options to this one and one made by Asus. ViewSonic is a brand that I've know and trusted since the days of CRTs and, while I've never owned an Asus monitor before, I've been a big fan of their motherboards for many years. The Asus monitor, however, only had USB-C input, which made it a deal breaker, so I went with the ViewSonic. The monitor is roughly the size and thickness of a laptop screen. It has a kickstand on the back that allows it to be positioned at any viewing angle. There are two USB-C ports, one mini HDMI port, and an 1/8" audio jack on the left side, a status LED on the right side, and two small speakers and a single four-way rocker button to control the settings on the back. The package included a 3ft USB-C cable, a 4ft HDMI to mini HDMI cable, and a Neoprene storage sleeve. I bought this monitor mainly to use with my newer MacBook that I have for for work, but I also planned to use it with my older personal MacBook which only has a mini DisplayPort/Thunderbolt connector on it, which is why the HDMI input was important to me. With USB-C the monitor can pull power from the device it's connected to, but it can also be powered on it's own with a simple phone charger via the second USB-C port. HDMI connections don't provide power, so a power adapter is needed when using the HDMI port. The power adapter is not included, but pretty much any recent phone charger will do. So, I said this thing has been extremely versatile, right? How have I been using it? Well... My initial plan was to use it to work from the kitchen table, which I've been doing. I usually start my day by looking over my email and Slack message while I eat breakfast and now I can do that more efficiently by not having to move windows around as I look up things to form my email replies. I've also found it useful to work from the couch in the evening. I set up the monitor on the end table and connect it to my laptop on my lap and I can easily take care of a bunch of the administrative busywork that I need to do while I watch TV. Doing this has let me stay more focused on meaningful work during the day. I can also connect my Samsung phone to this monitor and, with Samsung's DeX feature and a Bluetooth keyboard, I can use my phone as a full desktop. I admittedly don't have a ton of use for this, but it's still kind of cool. The phone's battery can power the screen if I want, but if I connect a charger to the second USB-C port on the screen will actually feed power back to my phone to keep it charged. During the winter, I have my bike set up on a trainer in my basement and I have a book holder that I attach to the handlebars to put my tablet on so I can stream TV while I ride. Well, now that I have this monitor, I can connect it to a Roku and have a much better view than I get from an 8" tablet screen. Unfortunately the trainer makes a lot of noise, so I have to use headphones in order to hear anything. On the tablet I use my Bluetooth headphones, but that's not an option with this, so I'm going to have to look for some kind of Bluetooth adapter. And finally, just yesterday one of my Raspberry Pis stopped responding. Rather than pulling the plug on it to reboot it and hope for the best, I connected this monitor and a keyboard to it and was able to diagnose the problem and do a safe reboot rather than a hard power down. So, as you can see, I'm pretty happy with my purchase. So far I've used the screen on my newer MacBook via USB-C directly, my older MacBook via a Thunderbolt to HDMI adapter, a Windows laptop via HDMI, a Roku Express via HDMI, and a Raspberry Pi via HDMI. All have worked flawlessly and I haven't had to touch any settings (other than volume). Color and brightness are good and the screen seems pretty responsive, though I've only used it for web browsing, business apps, Zoom calls, and a little bit of Netflix. My only complaint is with the sound. The speakers are way too small to be very useful and the volume control, witch requires clicking through a couple of menus in the settings panel, is hard to access. It'd be nicer if the speakers were moved to the front or sides of the unit so that the sound would at least be projected toward you, and it would be nice to have dedicated volume control buttons to make adjusting easier, but I can't really complain given that 99% of the time I'll be using the speakers on whatever the monitor is connected to rather than the monitor itself. So, if you're looking for a second monitor for a laptop (or anything else for that matter), you can't go wrong with this one.