VE6AB Technical
OTG Equipped Smartphones
Recently I was looking for a way of transferring photos that I shot with my DSLR to my smartphone.
Today more and more cameras have built in WIFI that support this, but my DSLR's do not have this convenience.
I do have the option of using an Eye-Fi SD card in the second memory card slot but prefer to use fast writing memory cards that allow the buffer to clear quicker.
While I was researching on how I could transfer photos from my DSLR's to my smartphone, I discovered that my Blackberry Z30 supported OTG.
What is OTG you ask?
OTG stands for “On the go”. With two devices that are USB OTG compatible you can make them communicate with each other and perform certain functions. The most common one we use is when we use a computer, which acts as a host, and connect a USB flash drive or a smartphone to it. With the introduction of more devices being OTG compatible, you can now bypass the computer. Photos can be sent directly from your camera to a printer, a keyboard can be connected directly to a mobile device, or a USB thumb-drive can be connected to your smartphone.
Although my BB Z30 gave no indication that it supported OTG, I discovered that it had the hardware to support OTG by trying it.
To do this I purchased an inexpensive micro USB OTG adapter M/F cable from my local computer store, the adapter cable you see in the photo connected to my smartphone.
When you plug this cable in the the phone, a message appears on the display that indicates that a USB device is connected.
At that point I opened the File Manager app on my smartphone, and then opened the USB device file that now was in the list of available devices.
The contents of my thumb-drive immediately appeared on the screen of my phone, allowing me to open the file I wished to open, or at least the files that my phone would open.
With a card reader connected to my smartphone via the USB OTG adapter cable as seen in the photo, and a memory card removed from my camera and inserted into the card reader, I can transfer high-quality photos to my smartphone and upload them from there to wherever I wish.
This is useful to show clients previews or share sneak-peeks of photo shoots through apps like Instagram.
I also am able to upload photos shot with my DSLR to Twitter when I am out and about and wish to share something with my followers.
I also found that I can connect my smartphone directly to my external powered hard drives without the use of my computer.
The hard drive does have to have a external power source though. With the hard drive connected, you can read, write, and transfer any stored files.
I suspect there is no end to the devices that I can connect to my smartphone, and already found that it supports a wireless mouse and keyboard connected to my phone.
You may be wondering if your smartphone supports OTG.
I understand that most Android powered devices do, although I cannot say that for a fact.
However it is worth checking out, as it is a feature that I cannot do without now that I discovered it lives on my smartphone, and only needed the USB OTG adapter cable that I purchased at Memory Express to bring this feature built in to my smartphone to life.
Click on the photo for a closer look....
