The Beelink Mate Pro

Even though I already have probably too many desks (my main work desk, a standing desk that has probably been improvised for far too long, and an occasional tactical take-over of our dining table), I spend around a third of my working hours on a laptop of some kind.

There are also three more people in the house, so the plight of the semi-nomadic laptop user who needs a quick, unobtrusive way to recharge while working or a temporary makeshift desk has become somewhat of a family thing, which in turn means I’ve been casually looking for a simple, functional, non-eyesore laptop dock for a while.

The Mate Pro in action, charging my earbuds.

That I ended up finding something that can act as a high-speed backup drive, HDMI dock and conference speaker I could take on vacation was, as Bob Ross would put it, just a happy accident.

Disclaimer: Beelink sent me a Mate Pro free of charge, and, as usual, this review follows my review policy.

In The Box

Opening the box yielded a nice surprise–a compact carrying case with the Mate Pro, power, HDMI and USB-C PD cables neatly stowed, which I was totally not expecting. This makes it great not just for our (very) occasional weekend/countryside jaunts, but also for tidily putting it away when not in use:

A rather tidy package.

The box itself is just… cute and compact (it’s a roughly one-litre cube, measuring 99×99×98.3mm), and unlike most Thunderbolt docks I’ve looked at, it is most definitely not a metallic dark eyesore. If you put away the cables and leave it on a table or desk just plugged into power, nobody in the family will object to how it looks, which is certainly a plus for something that is meant to be a desktop “hub”.

Hardware

The port selection is pretty comprehensive–besides the front USB-C (USB4v2) and USB-A ports, the back has, under its built-in speaker:

• IEC 60320 C8 240V connector, which goes into the built-in 140W power supply
• HDMI 2.0 (full-sized) that is exposed to the host via DisplayPort over USB-C
• USB-A
• 2.5GbE…