How to use an OTG cable for Android

Currently, most Android phones include support for USB OTG. But what exactly OTG means and what is an OTG cable?

OTG is the abbreviation of “On-The Go”. It is nothing more than an extension of the USB 2.0 protocol that can connect two devices without assigning the master and slave roles between the devices. That allows us to connect all kinds of accessories, from a mouse or a keyboard to a gamepad. If our device supports this technology, we can even use a USB memory stick as external storage.

This feature opens the possibility to use a wide range of accessories with the smartphone a tablet without using Bluetooth, which doesn’t always work as expected and can be difficult to configure. It also offers a big advantage regarding the data transfer, as it isn’t using the data connection, so the file transfer is much faster and easier.

To use any of these features, we need to buy an OTG cable, which can be purchased for a few dollars on any gadget’s shop (like Amazon). Once we have the cable, we can connect the device and it will be automatically detected. In case you want to connect a USB memory stick, we will need some app to use as a file management such as File Explorer File Manager or File Manager (Explorer).

So if our device has USB OTG support, we can use a lot of accessories easily and directly. If we are not sure if our phone or tablet integrates this technology, at the Google Play there is an application that can help us. It is USB Host Diagnostics, a totally free app that gives us all the information we need about the USB specifications of our device.