Review cover Sidetrak Slide Portable Monitor (Hardware)
Official GBAtemp Review

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The Sidetrak Slide is a portable monitor solution that mounts right to the back of any laptop to give you the dual monitor life you never knew you needed. Is it any good?

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Good Idea in Theory, Bad in Practice

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Have you ever been working on a laptop and thought “Gee, I really wish I had another screen here so I could better optimize my productivity and workflow, but I wish I didn’t have to carry it around…” Well, Mr. Oddly Specific Thought Man, now you can thanks to the Sidetrak Slide from Stand Steady! The SideTrak Slide is a portable monitor solution that’s designed to attach straight to the back of any laptop, providing a 12.5” 1080p IPS monitor that can be plugged into any PC’s USB 3.0 port! But does it work well?

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Screen Specifications:

  • Screen Size: 12.5"
  • Panel Type: IPS
  • Display Type: LCD
  • Resolution: 1920x1080
  • Brightness: 300 cd/m2 (aka 300nits)
  • Response Time: 30 ms
  • Refresh Rate: 50/60 Hz
  • Aspect Ratio: 16:9
  • Contrast Ratio: 600:1
  • Color Depth: RBG 6-bit+Hi FRC color depth
  • Power Consumption: 4.5 W
  • PPI: 176

First we’ll take a look at what you get if you buy your own Sidetrak Slide. Opening up the box you’ll find a nice installation guide, the device itself, four extra magnets, and a “magnet removal tool” which is basically just a plastic card. Mounting the SideTrak Slide is incredibly simple and basically takes less than a minute; you remove the film off the sticky pads on the magnets that are already in place on the mount, stick it to the back of your laptop (making sure the arrows on the plastic are pointing in the way you want the monitor to slide out to!), and push down gently on each corner where the magnets are located. Bam, done! And if you ever want to temporarily remove the mount from your laptop, it’s as simple as pulling them off the magnets. Very intuitive and easy to do, which is great, although having four random magnets sitting on the backside of your laptop’s screen looks kind of...weird. Once you’ve mounted the Slide to the back of your device, you’ll be able to slide the monitor on the rails to your preferred position, following the direction of the arrows, as the mount only slides one way. You can also swivel the monitor 180 degrees, allowing you to display data on the backside of your laptop without having to turn it around! Neat! Once you’ve slid your display out, you can plug it in via the included USB-C -> USB-C cable (which includes a USB-A adapter on the end, which is a nice touch), install the required drivers, and after a minute or two your second monitor will turn on and you can start your hardcore multitasking! 

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The SideTrak Slide utilizes DisplayLink, which is a VGC protocol that allows devices to interface with supported external displays over USB. Thanks to this software, the SideTrak Slide officially lists supports for Windows, macOS, and ChromeOS, however because it uses DisplayLink you can also use the monitor on most Linux distros, with official support for Debian, and unofficial support for other flavors like Arch or Fedora, as well as Android 5.0+. I was able to personally get the SideTrak Slide to work on all of the above (including even a Raspberry Pi, albeit with some additional fiddling and setup required), although something to keep in mind is that the Slide does need at least 4.5W of power, so if your device can’t output quite that much you may want to look into a powered USB hub. This is great for anyone who happens to dual (or in my case, triple) boot multiple OSs on their daily driver, because you’ll always be able to use your second screen regardless of what OS you're using. In terms of display quality, it’s pretty great thanks to its IPS panel and 1080p resolution, although something to keep in mind is that there’s really no way to calibrate anything on the display that I can find, even for something simple like brightness, so what you see is what you get. In regards to display lag, I probably wouldn't game on it as it has about 30ms worth of input delay, (which is less than noticeable for simple things like word docs or watching a video) but to be honest I wouldn't really recommend using it for games in the first place given it's just a 12.5" screen, and your main screen is more than likely going to be bigger and better suited to that. 

And that’s all well and good, but unfortunately that’s where the pros kind of stop, because there are a lot of issues with the SideTrak Slide that just makes the entire thing unwieldy and not quite as useful as you’d think. First and foremost is the weight, because boy is this thing chunky. The Slide weighs a total of 1.65lbs (0.75kg), which means you’re adding over a pound and a half of weight onto the screen of your laptop. If your laptop’s hinge can’t handle an extra 1.65lbs on the top end, your laptop is basically either going to close all the time on you or unfold itself all the way. This is the case on my budget HP laptop. Even if your hinge is strong enough for that extra weight, if it’s a bit light on the bottom half your whole laptop is still simply going to tilt backwards, as in the case with my 2017 Razer Blade 14. Unless your hands are on it or the screen is tilted forward enough to stop it from falling via gravity, it's going to tilt itself backwards. And this is on a flat surface like a table, if you’re working on a non-flat surface like say a lap, the moment you move your hands off the bottom it’s basically guaranteed to fall right off your lap and potentially on the floor. Not exactly something you want to happen if you’re using an expensive device like a laptop. Then there’s the quality of the overall build, specifically when the monitor has been extended: it WOBBLES. There’s simply no real support for the monitor itself besides the very edge of the rail, which results in this thing being unstable as all get out, which you can see in the video above. There’s just so much movement in the mount, especially when you’re just typing on the laptop, that it causes not just the Slide to wiggle and move, but your main laptop screen too thanks to all that weight. Some may get used to that eventually but for me, personally, it’s just too distracting, especially when I’m working. And then there’s the price: for the SideTrak Slide, you’re going to have to put down a fat $299.99. While it’s certainly not the most expensive portable screen out there, and it does have a nice way to mount to the laptop directly, you can buy a 15.6” 1080p screen for half the price, or two if you wanted to live that triple monitor life...for whatever reason. The idea to mount the screen directly to the laptop is a great one, but with the rather lackluster implementation done on the Slide I’m not so sure it’s worth all that extra money. 

Verdict

What We Liked ...
  • Decent display
  • Mounting system is great, except...
What We Didn't Like ...
  • HEAVY
  • Lack of stabilization causes the thing to wobble pretty hard
  • Pricey
5
out of 10

Overall

I'm not quite so sure I can recommend the SideTrak Slide. The idea is a good one in theory, I really like the way it mounts to the laptop itself and the display itself is decent in quality...but in practice Stand Steady could have done a better job with things like stability and the weight of the thing, especially with the $299.99 price point.
btw, i'm very curious why people needs 2nd monitor when they travel? cauz other than a traveling stock traders who needs 2nd monitor, i have absolutely no idea why any ordinary people needs a 2nd monitor while they are outside of home........
 
Thanks for the review! Great that you tested the display with a whole range of operating systems and devices :)

I like the idea of having a second laptop monitor that folds out or slides out. But this really doesn't seem very well implemented..

Btw, there's also a neat DIY approach to this:



I'd love to salvage the second screen from an old and broken Laptop to build this, but I don't really have the required skills to pull this off I think ^^'

kind regards :)
 
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30ms response...that's way to slow.
True, that's quite slow...but it's not a gaming monitor so it doesn't matter, you wouldn't be buying this for that. It's more for productivity and mobile workstation use, maybe as a dedicated Discord screen or for secondary documents/web browsing, stuff like that.

1080 on a 12.5 inch screen is asking for people to use magnifiers.
A bit overpriced, actually.
Resolution doesn't really matter that much these days given that every modern OS has display scaling built in, so it's not much of an issue (otherwise why would people be making 13" 4k laptops? :P) But it's definitely pricey for sure, the unique mounting mechanism is...nice I guess, but definitely not worth the huge price, especially when it has its own issues.

btw, i'm very curious why people needs 2nd monitor when they travel? cauz other than a traveling stock traders who needs 2nd monitor, i have absolutely no idea why any ordinary people needs a 2nd monitor while they are outside of home........
Why not? Maybe you don't need a second monitor "outside of home", but there are plenty of jobs/hobbies that benefit from having multiple monitors, not just "stock traders". People bring laptops to offices, classrooms, coffee shops, libraries, even just around your house outside of your normal workspace, all places where someone might want to do some kind of work and have the convenience of multiple screens (well, before the Covid times anyways :lol:). If second monitors were useless for most people, there wouldn't be so many portable monitors on the market.
 
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I'll just wait for someone to make a more slim, lightweight, less wobbly and cheaper version... overall its a cool idea and definitely something I would use.
 
Wow that's expensive and sounds like they dropped the ball on the design. I bought a below $200 15.6 4k display that's usb powered, not heavy, can be used for a switch and Samsung dex, has touchscreen and a micro usb 2 go port that probably works much better.
 
Wow that's expensive and sounds like they dropped the ball on the design. I bought a below $200 15.6 4k display that's usb powered, not heavy, can be used for a switch and Samsung dex, has touchscreen and a micro usb 2 go port that probably works much better.
Where can I buy this?
 
True, that's quite slow...but it's not a gaming monitor so it doesn't matter, you wouldn't be buying this for that. It's more for productivity and mobile workstation use, maybe as a dedicated Discord screen or for secondary documents/web browsing, stuff like that.
A 30ms monitor is basically only for still images and no mouse movements at all unless you wanna get dizzy and sick. Digital picture frame i'd say is best description of this monitor by what i see here.

15 years ago, when i got my first LCD monitor it had slow LCD response rate of 8ms! so yeah...30 is even worst than that and even sega game gear, which had an awful response!
 
Where can I buy this?
I bought it off a local site. I think the price even went down lol. Aliexpress probably has it too.

https://www.lazada.com.ph/products/...ch-pc-with-case-i1335988654-s4894816167.html?

I initially bought the 4k one with battery but it was defective in ways (Battery drains suspiciously fast, setting settings doesn't save (like calibration), there was a hair inside. Returned it and got the battery-less one. It's thinner and much lighter. The only thing that they battery had was you could rotate the setting UI by 180 degrees.

I've finished Carrion on it and use it as a spare display for console games.
 
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