I caved and bought an $80 portable monitor. Now I love working remotely

I’ve been working exclusively from home for well over a decade, so as you can imagine I’ve grown quite comfortable in my cozy home office with a pair of monitors, my trusty MX keyboard, and lots of fresh coffee. I also like working from other places, including restaurants, cafés, and hotels—except that comes with a huge downside.

I hate working on my laptop while on the go because one screen just isn’t enough for me anymore. It cripples my productivity and gets in the way of my developed-over-the-decades writing process. I need multiple displays and split screen for all my apps, which is fine when I’m at home but not so fine when I’m restricted to a single laptop screen.

Fortunately, I no longer have to deal with that ever since I picked up the Arzopa S1 Table portable monitor! Oh, I couldn’t be happier.

This portable monitor is a 15.6-inch IPS display with a 1080p resolution and 60Hz refresh rate. It’s nothing to write home about spec-wise—certainly not as fancy as a 4K screen or OLED panel—but it’s exactly what I need without going overboard. It’s not like I need a second monitor that’s larger than my HP ProBook 450 G9 laptop, especially when I’m out and about. No, the Arzopa S1 Table was the perfect choice.

I love that it has two standard USB-C ports and a Mini HDMI option, but my laptop complicates things because it only has one USB-C port (that’s usually taken by something else) and a full-sized HDMI port. Thankfully, Arzopa thought ahead and packed three cables with this monitor: a USB-C-to-USB-C, a USB-C-to-USB-A, and an HDMI-to-Mini-HDMI. That covers pretty much all combos, letting me keep my laptop plugged in to charge via USB-C while connected to video via HDMI-to-Mini-HDMI. And ta daaaa! I now have two screen wherever I go.

I also love that this portable monitor comes with its own smart cover, so I can comfortably slip it into my bag right next to my laptop without worrying about it getting scratched. With it only weighing 1.7 pounds, it doesn’t add a lot of extra heft. The cover doubles as a stand with different viewing angle options, so I can prop it slightly when I’m reading PDFs or tent it straight up when streaming YouTube.

Oh, and it also works with my smartphone! I have a Samsung Galaxy S24+ that connects to the monitor and triggers Samsung DeX, which is basically a tablet PC with my smartphone as a touchpad for controlling the on-screen mouse cursor. It’s brilliant for times when I wish my phone had a bigger screen yet I don’t need a keyboard (so no laptop needed). For amusement’s sake, I also tried to connect the screen to an iPhone, but it just mirrored whatever was playing on there. Still, not bad.

The Arzopa S1 Table launched at $109.99 but has been hovering around $80 lately. If you wait for a big sales event, you might even be able to catch it as low as $65. But it’s so darn useful that if I had to do it over, I’d rather get it now than wait a few months to save a measly $15 or $20. Remote working is better with a portable monitor, period.