The Handheld Dock Chroma from Razer is a compact stand and dock for portable gaming consoles and tablets, offering charging and an interface to send your games to a bigger screen. As the name suggests, it includes RGB lighting that's part of Razer's Chroma ecosystem. It was announced at CES in January, and it recently started shipping. Is it any good? Well, largely yes, with some important caveats.
What I like about the Razer Handheld Dock Chroma
The Razer Handheld Chroma Dock is well built. It follows the company's signature trend of delivering high-quality accessories that look great and are reliably durable. The metal build quality is a nice touch against all the other plastic, cheap-feeling options out there. It's also fairly small, making it easy to drop in a bag as you head out. That's kind of the point, as Razer designed this dock to be portable, fitting in nicely with the whole idea of handheld gaming in the first place.
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One big difference of the Dock Chroma, compared to other docks and which also plays well into the portability aspect, is that the stand to hold the handheld is adjustable. It will lie flat, covering the mounting deck entirely and turning the whole thing into a little cube. Or you can adjust it as steep as 75 degrees to find the perfect viewing angle while gaming.
As the Chroma name suggests, there's an RBG light strip on the front that syncs up with your Chroma settings. If you aren't using a device that supports Chroma, there's a button on the right side you can use to cycle between some preset lighting scenes.
What I don't like about the Razer Handheld Dock Chroma
The first odd design choice almost flies in the face of the whole portable idea: There's a USB-C cable sticking out of the back. This is what you connect to your handheld but oddly it can't be detached or even folded into the dock itself. So it's a bit clunky from a portability standpoint.
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Then there's the port selection. There's a 100-watt USB-C port, three USB-A Gen 1 ports, a gigabit Ethernet port and an HDMI 2.0 port. That's not a terrible port selection for a docking station, but the lack of a second USB-C, DisplayPort or a 3.5mm headphone port is rather disappointing.
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