At first glance, this worked without a delay, even though there were probably hundreds if not more than a thousand WLAN connections from CES visitors mulling around the Synaptics booth at CES. According to Synaptics, the wireless docking system recognizes the available space in the spectrum and adjusts accordingly.
In this way, Synaptics was able to demonstrate “docking” that worked across a distance of several meters. Synaptics calls this “docking on approach.” The users simply walk towards the dock, and the keyboard, mouse, and monitors as well as other equipment are connected automatically.
Particularly when working on productive tasks with text documents, the bandwidth is supposed to be very small. The compression recognizes such content and is supposed to ensure that other artifacts do not interfere with the text in particular. At the same time, the codec understands the situation in the WiFi spectrum and is able to adjust, so that the display of the text documents remains sharp, while being able to transfer video content, for example, at a lower quality.
Lenovo requires the direct contact.
In principle, Lenovo’s dock is able to do all that as well, even if it is probably slightly more limited on the software side. The USB and display “docking” is only activated when the laptop is placed on the physical dock. This has six large metal contact plates where the laptop can be placed fairly freely. If the position of the laptop is shifted by accident, the connection still remains active for 5 seconds.
In other words, Lenovo’s ThinkBook doesn’t really need the contact, but this is a design decision. However, the 5 seconds are not final yet, and Lenovo is still working on the technology and the ideal value. The advantage of this solution is that if you lift the laptop off the dock, you can be sure that nothing remains connected anymore.
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