HALO Touch V2 Review: A Touchscreen USB Hub With a Rotary Encoder

A Desktop USB Hub That Earns Its Footprint

Most desktop USB hubs disappear into the clutter behind your monitor. The HALO Touch V2 does the opposite: it puts a 360x360 circular IPS touchscreen and a rotary encoder right where your hand already rests. This touchscreen USB hub combines cable management with genuine desk interactivity, and at $69.99 on Tindie it undercuts most standalone smart dials that do far less.

I want to be clear about what this device actually is, because the screen tends to steal the attention. Underneath the circular display sits a working USB 2.0 hub. You get two Type-A downstream ports and one Type-C, so a keyboard, a mouse dongle, and a portable SSD all live comfortably off a single upstream cable.

Ports, Networking, and Real Throughput

Here is where the HALO Touch V2 separates itself from novelty dials. It adds 100 Mbps Ethernet and 2.4 GHz Wi-Fi, which means the puck on your desk is also a network client. The 100 Mbps wired link is plenty for the on-device apps and system telemetry, and the 2.4 GHz radio keeps the unit connected when you would rather not run a cable.

The USB 2.0 ceiling is the honest tradeoff at this price. You are looking at roughly 480 Mbps of shared bus bandwidth across the downstream ports, so this is a peripherals-and-flash-storage hub, not a bulk video-capture rig. For keyboards, receivers, audio interfaces, and the occasional thumb drive, it never felt constrained in daily use.

Per-Port Power Monitoring and the Rotary Encoder

The rotary encoder is the interaction star. Spin it to scrub volume, cycle app pages, or nudge a value; press it to select. Paired with the touchscreen, navigation is quick and tactile in a way a flat panel alone never manages.

One spec that hardware people will appreciate: per-port power monitoring. The screen can report current draw on each downstream port, which is a genuinely useful diagnostic when a bus-powered device misbehaves or a cable is quietly starving your gear.

Built-In Apps That Actually Get Used

The firmware ships with a surprisingly practical app roster. There is a Pomodoro timer, an MP3 player, an audio spectrum visualizer, a photo and animation viewer, and AIDA64 system monitoring that pulls CPU, GPU, and thermals straight to the dial. On Windows, the encoder registers as a Microsoft Surface Dial, so it slots into apps that already support that input.

Everything is customizable through a microSD card. You drop in your own themes, media, and notification sounds, and the device reads them on boot. That open, file-based approach is exactly what the maker crowd wants: no cloud account, no locked ecosystem, just a card you populate yourself.

Who Should Buy the HALO Touch V2

This is a clever, affordable maker gadget first and a productivity tool second. If you want an at-a-glance AIDA64 monitor, a physical volume dial, and a tidy USB 2.0 hub in one puck, the $69.99 asking price is easy to recommend. The Surface Dial compatibility and per-port power monitoring are the kind of thoughtful touches that make a desk accessory feel designed rather than assembled.

Sources: CNX Software, July 3, 2026.