Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

The UtechSmart USB C hub is a great addition to a Microsoft Surface Book 2 laptop. The hub draws its power from the type C port built into the SB2, which means you don't need to find an outlet to use your laptop with the hub. This is very useful for those of us who work on battery power occasionally. The hub also provides power to connected devices while running from the laptop battery. This ability makes it more useful to road warriors and students than the Microsoft hub for the SB2. I'll give you an example. I was able to run the laptop, the UtechSmart hub, ethernet, a 512GB SD card, and a second 11.6" touch screen display (a super thin USB powered 1080p display from MageDok) using only the internal laptop battery as the power source for everything. The hub was connected using the USB C port on the SB2. The secondary display was connected to both a USB 2 port and the HDMI port on the hub. The USB 2 port provides power and touchscreen functionality for the display. The HDMI port on the hub provided the display signal. It works nicely in this configuration. At this moment, I even have gigabit ethernet and a large SD card attached to the hub while running the secondary display. For full cordless portability, one would obviously use WiFi. Even with all of that connected, I am writing this review on the secondary display while running tests on the primary display. This is all powered by the laptop battery without any external power source connected. Bonus geek points awarded! Ten things I like about this hub: 1. This hub will power a secondary display if the display can be powered from USB. 2. The hub passes the USB C data connection through to a USB C port on the hub, so you don't lose a single port. It's all gain with no pain. 3. It includes a decent quality card reader for SD/TF, micro SD, and MMC memory cards. While I have used slightly faster, single-purpose USB C card readers, you can't beat the convenience of having the reader included as part of a single connection hub. That's one less item to carry around. 4. There is an audio jack which supports headsets with microphones built in. If you use Skype or play multi-user games with audio chat functions, this is a nice bonus feature. 5. In addition to a USB C port, there are two USB 2 ports and two USB 3 ports. You simply can't have too many ports. 6. Here is a nice little surprise bonus. For those who have an old VGA monitor sitting unused in a closet, dust it off! This hub has a native 15 pin VGA connector which will let you use that old monitor as a secondary display. Re-use beats recycle every time and now you can justify the fact that you kept that old display. 7. You get a lot of ports, a card reader, plus HDMI and VGA video outputs all rolled into one amazingly compact device. 8. For the amount of included functionality, this hub seems pretty reasonably priced. 9. It survived my torture test where I had two huge memory cards, two huge thumb drives, an external display, and my gigabit ethernet all connected at the same time performing a variety of tasks. No explosions, fireballs, or loss of limbs occurred. :) 10. The USB interface easily kept up with multiple simultaneous transfers running between memory devices. The read/write speeds of the cards were the limiting factor, not the hub. Five things I don't like about this hub: 1. It runs very warmly if you are powering several attached items at once. During my testing with a touch screen display, SD cards, thumb drives, and an ethernet cable attached, it became almost too hot to touch. This may be specific to my odd configuration, though. My external display draws its power from the hub. Most displays have their own power supply. 2. This hub only has one HDMI output. However, USB C is supposed to support 4K Display Port output, too. Unfortunately, I didn't have a USB C to Display Port cable available to test it. 3. The hub has no option to use an external power brick. It always draws power through the USB C port. This is both a benefit and a drawback. It allows you to use the hub when no electrical outlet is available. But, when running on only your laptop battery, your run-time is reduced by both the hub and all of the devices attached to the hub. In my case, with the secondary display drawing power from the laptop and both displays set pretty bright, the extra power drain took several hours off my normal runtime. Since I only run on battery for short periods, this didn't affect my use. Your needs may be different. 4. This criticism applies to nearly every hub out there. Why include ANY USB 2 ports when USB 3 ports are backward compatible? While including both is seemingly common practice, I have never understood the logic. I would have preferred 4 x USB 3 or even better, 4 x 3.1 ports. Instead, we get 2 x USB 2 and 2 x USB 3. 5. This was the worst drawback I found. The hub I received would only recognize one memory card in the two slot card reader at a time. I could not access a micro SD and SD at the same time. Only the first card inserted was recognized. This means I couldn't copy files directly from one card to another card, which is something I do regularly. Luckily for me, my Surface Book 2 has a built-in SD card reader, so I can copy files using one slot on the hub and the internal slot. Still, this limitation is annoying. My suggestions for improvement: 1. Add the option of using an external power brick with the hub. 2. Swap the USB 2 ports for additional USB 3 ports. Even better, swap all of the non-C ports for USB 3.1. 3. Replace the VGA port with a 4K Display Port connection. This would be far more useful for the majority of customers. 4. MOST IMPORTANTLY: Make both memory card slots accessible simultaneously. USB C can easily accommodate the bandwidth required to use both card slots simultaneously. The excellent USB 3.1 card reader I normally use has all 4 of its memory card slots active at once. Conclusion: There is little doubt that this hub is a great value at the price. The performance was reasonably good. The fact that it could power my external display from my laptop battery was a nice surprise, allowing me to continue using two displays when no wall outlet was available. I was even able to try out the VGA port with an old display I had, but I would never use that feature in practice. The downside to running everything attached to the hub from my laptop battery was that it cut my battery life nearly in half. Still, I find that feature useful to have. To be honest, the only critical disappointment I had was that you can only use one memory card slot at a time. While I can thankfully work around that limitation on my SB2, or even use my other card reader instead, I must admit that if I had known about this limitation in advance, I may have chosen to purchase a different hub. Since I use a lot of single board computers for making gadgets, I copy files between multiple memory cards pretty frequently. Ultimately, that single shortcoming cost the hub one star off my rating. If copying files between two memory cards is one of your primary requirements, you may want to look elsewhere. If that limitation doesn't affect your intended use of this hub, I feel it is a great choice which I can definitely recommend. I plan to continue using this hub but plan to keep using my existing card reader.