The IT Nerd

Over the last few months I’ve been evolving my home office desk setup. Which meant looking at the tech and other items that I have which allows me to be more productive. While I admit that this is still a work in progress, the pieces are starting to fall into place on that front. One of those pieces is the Kensington UH1400P USB-C Mobile Hub which is currently my docking solution of choice at the moment. Let’s have a look at the mobile hub.

From the back you get a HDMI 2.0 port capable of 4K resolution at 60 Hz, a USB-A 3.2 Gen1 port, and a USB-C port which supports USB-C PD 3.0 power delivery.

On the front you get two more USB-A 3.2 Gen1 ports as well as an SD card reader and a microSD card reader. The card readers do UHS-I speeds which is 104 Mbps.

On the side you get an Ethernet jack capable of gigabit speeds.

The mobile hub is tiny. If you’re using this on the go it will easily fit into a backpack or a briefcase. In my case, I’m using it on my desk because it takes up very little real estate. It’s also made of metal (which is handy because while it is in use it is warm to the touch) and feels very premium. Kensington promises that this mobile is plug and play. And that was the case when I plugged it into my Mac as it worked without any drivers or hopping through hoops to get it going.

Now my use case is to have it connected to my Acer monitor, my uninterruptible power supply, and have it charging my MacBook Pro. To help with that last part, I also got this:

This is the Kensington 100W USB-C Power Adapter which uses GaN technology to pack a lot of charging power into a small package. And as a bonus, it won’t produce a lot of heat in the process.

Here’s the Kensington power adapter next to the Apple 140W adapter that came with my MacBook Pro. As you can see it’s significantly smaller, and I can say it’s lighter as well. Now while I will highlight that the Apple adapter will do 140W, it will only do that over MagSafe. Via USB-C it’s capped at 100W. So if you’re travelling, you likely want to carry the Kensington power adapter with you because it will take up less space and it is lighter. But in my case, I replaced the Apple adapter with the Kensington one because it takes up less space on my uninterruptible power supply. That allows me to get this result:

This gives me a one cable solution that allows me to use my monitor and charge my MacBook Pro as well as have the uninterruptible power supply communicate with my computer. And unlike the USB-C adapter that I was using previously, I get two USB-A ports and a couple of card reader ports as well. I’m not using the Ethernet jack as I’ve got 802.11ax/WiFi in the condo which eliminates the need for a wired connection.

One thing that I did observe is from a video perspective, this hub delivers much sharper and more fluid video than my previous adapter provided. And it supported 120 Hz video via HDMI even though 60 Hz is the supposed limit of the Kensington adapter. In terms of data transfer speeds, while the Kensington adapter maxes out at 5Gbps a second, I found transfer speeds from USB-A attached devices more than acceptable. If you need something faster, Kensington can sell you a Thunderbolt 3 or 4 dock. In terms of charging, the Kensington adapter is capped at 85W which is fine for me as my MacBook Pro has amazing battery life and 85W allows me to charge it at a decent rate.

In terms of gripes? I really don’t have any major ones. This seems to be a well sorted piece of kit that I’d recommend either for a portable use case or my use case. Kensington UH1400P USB-C Mobile Hub has a MSRP of $99.99 CDN and the Kensington 100W USB-C Power Adapter has a MSRP of $99.99 CDN. That’s not a lot to pay for the functionality that you get. I’d take a good look at these products if you need a USB-C hub and power adapter at your desk or on the go.

This entry was posted on April 21, 2022 at 10:54 am and is filed under Products with tags Kensington. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.