Mobile monitors or portable displays are becoming more common nowadays and have found some pretty creative and useful use cases. For some people, they are secondary monitors, while others treat it as a primary monitor to portable devices such as a console or, in our case, a mobile phone.
The Viewsonic TD1655 fits the same profile and packs a lot of features. We’ve been using this portable monitor for over a month now and have found so many uses for it.
This device is large enough to extend your screen real estate and even compliments our 13-inch Macbook Pro yet portable enough to fit your backpack. For its size, it’s surprisingly light at only 2.1lbs. The design is simple and elegant — all-black upfront and silver around the sides and the back. It reminds us of the Microsoft Surface, only a bit bigger.
It comes with a kickstand hidden at the back, with most of the ports situated on the display’s left side. There are two USB Type-C ports for charging and connecting to other devices, a mini HDMI port and a 3.5mm audio port. There’s a mini joystick at the bottom right corner of the backside to control and navigate the monitor’s OSD. There’s surprisingly a lot of features in there.
The monitor has a size of 15.6 inches and a display resolution of 1920×1080 pixels. This panel is IPS, so we got great viewing angles, bright and crisp display, nice contrast, and colors. The OSD allows you to set the brightness, contrast, and View Mode (Office, Movie, Mac, Mono, Game) to adapt to your settings and use. We found everything easy to use and self-explanatory we did not bother to check on the manuals or anything one first use.
Our first instinct upon the initial unboxing of this portable monitor was to plug it into our laptop. It came with several cables — one Type-C to Type-C, another Type-A to Type, and another Type-C charging cable. As with any other external monitor, you can set the TD1655 to either mirror your primary display or extend the display so you’d get that much-needed screen real estate.
Actually, you don’t need the wall charger if you’re going to hook this monitor into a laptop as it will draw power and video feed from the laptop via the Type-C port. Of course, you will still be needing the wall charger once you connect the portable monitor to other devices like a smartphone. You can even power it up using a regular powerbank, so that’s really nifty.
We can connect the TD1655 to our Huawei Mate 30 Pro 5G, and it worked just great. It mirrored the phone’s display, and since the Mate 30 Pro has a Desktop Mode, we were able to switch to it and use the monitor as a desktop PC with the phone as a touchscreen input device.
Likewise, the TD1655 has a 10-point capacitive touch feature, so if your laptop’s OS supports it, you can use the touchscreen to navigate or pick-up the included stylus for it. When hooked up to a smartphone, the screen’s touch capability is fully realized — we could play Mobile Legends on the monitor itself, and it wasn’t that bad. It’s like playing ML on a big tablet, which is kind of cool.
If there’s one thing we wanted Viewsonic would have improved, it would be the dual 0.8-watt speakers at the back. They weren’t as loud as we wanted them to be, so I guess you’ll have to do with the earphones instead. Or perhaps, a Bluetooth speaker?
Overall, the Viewsonic TD1655 is an excellent, compact, and versatile portable monitor. It’s light and compact, has a one-cable solution, easy to carry around with its anti-slip cover, and affordable. You can grab one from stores or in Lazada for about PHP 15k.
