It could even be of use to education or in offices when giving a presentation, as you can connect your smartphone to a projector to show videos, documents and slides, rather than having to bring a laptop in.
In fact productivity is a key area of focus for the MHL Consortium. According to Dr Chen "we shouldn't forget about the enterprise aspect.
"Apple are going after the PC market with a bigger iPad so portable devices encroaching on desktops is something that's already happening. We think MHL is well positioned to capitalise on that."
What features does it include?
MHL is improving all the time. Versions 1 and 2 support 1080p uncompressed HD video and 8 channel audio and while the MHL Consortium was unwilling to comment on exactly what's next for the technology, the most recent update to MHL 3.0 only came out in August, bringing with it a bunch of new features.
These include support for 4K video, enhanced 7.1 surround sound with Dolby TrueHD and DTS-HD Master Audio, support for multiple simultaneous displays and more. It's also backwards compatible with MHL 1 and MHL 2.
A spokesperson said "as a set-top box, our latest specification can scale all the way up to 4K so movies will be able to be seen at cinema-quality resolution and supports the latest audio formats such as DTS-HD and Dolby TrueHD.
"We also support Remote Control Protocol (RCP) that allows the TV's remote control to access the phone's content and use popular remote buttons such as Stop, Play, Rewind, Pause and Enter. This gives users a real "lean back" experience."
While the features of MHL 4.0 remain in the dark, an MHL Consortium spokesperson was able to share some visions the company has for future uses of the technology, saying that there was the potential for "adding MHL inside tomorrow's aeroplanes so passengers can connect their mobile devices to seat backs to watch movies and TV programmes" and "adding MHL to elliptical trainers to charge their phones and give them access to all of their favourite mobile content while they work out."
And one thing we can confirm is that MHL won't be going wireless. That's disappointing, as given how many things are now wireless the act of actually having to plug a cable in seems curiously quaint and dated.
But there's good reasons for its wired ways, the biggest of which being that according to the MHL Consortium no wireless technology can deliver all of MHL's features in one connection.
Then there's the fact that limited speed and bandwidth could lead to quality or latency issues. Dr Chen explained that even for something as simple as scrolling through an Excel spreadsheet it's amazing the difference that MHL makes versus a wireless solution.
Not to mention the fact that a wireless connection wouldn't be able to charge your phone and no-one wants their battery to die midway through a rousing speech or five metres from a save point.
Getting it out there
One of the big problems is getting MHL out there, building awareness and getting it into the hands of consumers.
A spokesperson for the MHL Consortium told us that "since the retail introduction of the first MHL-enabled devices, the MHL ecosystem has grown to an installed base of more than 400 million products." Which is a great start, but the majority of smartphone users still aren't using it.
One reason for that is that while it's now compatible with most Android phones and tablets, MHL is still not compatible with iPhones, iPads, Windows Phone handsets or Windows Tablets. But, as the MHL Consortium explained to us, "MHL is an open standard and connector agnostic, so anything is possible.
"It is also OS-agnostic as it offers the ability to be implemented in any existing OS platform since most of the features are built-in and therefore plug-and-play."
