DisplayLink will try to turn smartphones into PC substitutes using special docking stations

Synaptics-owned DisplayLink showed off docking stations at CES 2025 that let you turn your Android smartphone into a desktop computer. The shown wired and wireless docking stations allow you to connect a mouse, keyboard and up to two displays to your smartphone, and the latter do not duplicate the smartphone screen, but display their own content. DisplayLink considers today’s smartphones to be comparable to current Intel Core i5 chips.

Image source: Displaylink

A decade ago, Microsoft made an attempt to turn the smartphone into a full-fledged PC using Continuum technology, which provided connections between a smartphone running Windows 10 Mobile and a mouse, keyboard and display. While the idea sounded great in marketing presentations, in reality Continuum’s technology was slow and unreliable. A similar Lap Dock solution from HP also did not take off.

Now, nearly a decade later, a major peripheral company says the docking station’s time has come. According to DisplayLink experts, modern smartphones have become powerful enough to fully implement this technology.

«Now you can dock your [smartphone] with a dock connected to your PC, you can control two 4K 60Hz displays, a keyboard and a mouse. You can access flash drives, anything you might want. There is no real difference,” said a DisplayLink spokesperson.

On PCs, DisplayLink technology works by compressing the information sent to the screen with minimal degradation in visual quality. DisplayLink requires a software driver that the manufacturer calls a “virtual graphics card,” which means it must either be downloaded from an external source or supported by the smartphone or OS manufacturer.

DisplayLink hopes to convince smartphone makers that their hardware can be used to support multi-monitor configurations—all that’s required is investment in docking stations and software support for the technology at the driver level.

Today, the most famous working technology for interacting a smartphone with peripherals is DeX from Samsung – it can display the Android application screen on a connected display, but this is, by and large, its capabilities.