Things You can Do with an OTG Cable On An Android Phone

With a lot of people owning smartphones, it’s surprising only a few people are maximizing their devices. When all you do with your device is to make and receive phone calls and surf the web, the device is being underused. Your Android phone or tablet offers a lot more than you know and there are lots of accessories to get the most out of your device.

One of such accessories is an OTG (on-the-go) cable. You probably have it already and it’s possible you’ve never seen it but this tiny cable opens your device to more possibilities. 6 Awesome Things You Can Do On Android With an OTG Cable

1. Charging a phone with another phone

This isn’t new and it’s one of the things most people do with an OTG cable. An OTG cable easily lets you charge another phone with your phone so far it supports it. It’s as simple as connecting the OTG cable to the host and then plugging the phone to be charged into the female port of the OTG cable as shown below.

2. Super-fast File Transfer Between Devices

 

When transferring files from one Android phone to another, the first thing that comes to mind is Flashare or Xender. These apps connect through WiFi and it’s a known fact there’s a limitation in terms of speed. As far as I know, using an OTG cable is the fastest way to transfer files between devices.


When transferring heavy files like game data and HD movies, using an OTG cable is the best way to the get it done within a very short time.

3. Using an External Game Controller

Whenever I pick up my Xbox 360 game controller, it’s either to kill adversaries at Call of Duty, explore the beautiful world of Far Cry or beat someone silly at Mortal Kombat. Playing games on a touchscreen is not the same as holding a real game controller or a portable console like PSP and if you have a tablet, you can try connecting your game controller with your device using your OTG cable.
I had issues trying to make it work at first but eventually got it right and mapped each button the way I wanted. It worked fine with Modern Combat 4 and Shadow Gun: Deadzone. Some devices like Nexus support external controllers right out of the box but if yours don’t, there’s a way out.

You can use USB BT JoyCenter app with its Joy2Touch plugin.  With this you can use almost any unsupported game controller with any game and map the buttons just the way you want it.

4. Using a Flash Drive

Your flash drive isn’t meant for your computer alone, you can use it with your Android device as long as you have your OTG cable with you. It’s plug and play with no settings needed. Think about the possibilities: watching movies from your flash drive, moving files around, reading documents stored on flash…

5. Using a Mouse or Keyboard

I don’t have one of those portable keyboards and decided to see if the regular keyboard for my desktop computer would work on my Android device and was amazed it actually worked. It’s one of those big desktop keyboards for Windows with dedicated media buttons and surprisingly, those media buttons even worked perfectly.

I tried the HP wireless mouse I normally use with my laptop on my smartphone and a cursor appeared. It worked perfectly all thanks to my OTG cable.
This may not really make sense if you have the normal Android accessories performing these functions but hey, what’s wrong with performing a little experiment?

6. Using a 3G Modem

If you have a WiFi only tablet and think it’s completely useless without a WiFi network, your 3G modem might just work on it if you have an OTG cable.