With the evolution of MHL to MHL 3.0, you can now transfer data at much faster rate and can also charge your mobile device to 10W during operation. This opens an interesting feature for gamers, who can now play games on their Android phones on a larger display and can also connect a Bluetooth keyboard or joystick for full fledged gaming experience.

MHL Consortium promoters like Silicon Image will take this to the next level by providing with a MHL 3.0  and MHL2.0 based SmartBook which looks and feels like a desktop but under the hood lacks a processing unit. You can connect your phone via MHL to the SmartBook and the result will be a fully fledged Android Laptop which is cheap, light and more portable. The SmartBook will be priced for less than 10,000 INR.

Why would we need a SmartBook?

Apart from acting as a more than handy laptop, the SmartBook will well justify upcoming phones with loads of processing power. It would make more sense for your smartphones to carry lofty specs, say, 4 GB RAM. It will help extend smartphone functionality for better use of octa cores and hexa cores that we start appearing in phones in near future

How Windows Phone with MHL Devices make Difference?

In-spite of Nokia being a part of MHL consortium, Lumia phones don’t come with MHL functionality. In Windows Phone 8.1, Microsoft has provided with Universal App support, which means you can run Windows 8.1 desktop apps on Windows Phone as well.

Since Windows OS still dominates the laptop ecosystem, A MHL Compatible Windows phone smartphone will mean much more adoption for Windows Phone as well as MHL Smartbook. Microsoft has been trying to replace laptops with its Surface Pro series tablets and Surface Pro 3 is quite convincing as well, but still remains an expensive option. SmartBook is something that we see working in price sensitive markets like India.

Conclusion

In 2013 more than 22 percent smartphones were shipped with MHL and this number will significantly increase this year. For now Sony Xperia Z2 is the only smartphone with MHL 3.0 support. MHL 3.0 now supports higher data transfer, better Audio, up to 4K Resolution, support for 4K display and Multi-Display. The possibility to expand the usage of your smartphone to a gaming console, Media center and a portable laptop is alluring and we can expect to see a lot more of MHL in future.