Three Ways To Use The Galaxy S4 USB Port For More Than Charging The Battery - Maybe.

A number of times recently, I have found myself with the pressing need to send someone a file via email in places where the only nearby Internet access was in my pocket; my cell phone.  In theory I should be able to tether the phone to my laptop long enough to make that happen, but in practice that isn't always the case.  For one thing, my phone isn't rooted, and most of the tethering utilities only work on a rooted unit.  For another, having seen the way that using a typical smartphone as a hotspot drains the battery at warp speed, there's no guarantee that I'd be able to keep the connection alive long enough to get the job done.  So I went looking for a way to transfer the file from the laptop to the phone.

And I found several.

The first, which sufficed in a pinch but wasn't particularly practical, was to transfer the file to the micro SD card that I'd installed in my phone soon after acquiring it.  With my Samsung Galaxy S4, this involved removing the protective case, the battery cover, and the battery.  I pulled the SD card out of the socket, slid it into the USB reader I carry around with my camera, and plugged that into the laptop that had the needed file.  It took the usual 45 seconds for that 13-year-old laptop to remember that it knew it had a USB port, gripe about kids on its lawn, and recognize the card, and then I was able to copy the file over and tell it to eject the USB reader.  After retrieving the card from the reader and slipping it into the phone along with the battery, I was able to restart the phone, use my file manager app to find the item I needed, attach it to an email and send it on its way.  It took longer to reassemble the outer case than to find and send the file.

And that was what made me decide that I needed to find a better way.

So, when the modern user needs a tech gadget that the folks at the electrotoy stores haven't already been pestering you mercilessly to buy, where's the first place to look?  Hong Kong!  But flying there is too much of a pain in the neck with all the TSA crap (not to mention costing even more than a cab ride from Penn Station to La Guardia), so the logical thing to do is - hit eBay.  Every Hong Kong merchant with a son-in-law who needs a little extra income has a dozen seller IDs on eBay these days, so there are lots of sources selling what looks like it amounts to the same thing.  And sometimes they are.

And sometimes they are... crap.

The first thing I decided to try was the OTG 3 in 1 Mobile Phone Connection, for less than $3 including postage to the USA.  (OTG is an acronym for On The Go, bestowed by the Android folks for accessories that plug into the SB socket.  It's not a brand name.)  It had a Type A USB socket, a regular SD slot, and a Micro SD slot.  Such a deal!  I ordered it.  Actually, at that price, I ordered two of them, so that we'd have one for the other phone as well.  A couple of weeks went by, and they arrived in my mailbox.

Eagerly, I plugged one into my phone, inserted the full-size SD card from my camera, and went looking for photos.  Yup, it accessed them.  Sort of.  About half of them, anyway.  Some of the photos produced error messages; the phone complained that it didn't know what to do with them.  So I tried the next step; I attempted to copy one of the not-compatible photos to the internal SD card, and then send it to myself via email so that I could see if the file was really munged or if the phone or the reader was the problem.  To make a long story short, by the time the file got to my laptop, it was so trashed that it was useless.  But worse, so was the directory on the SD card.  (I was later able to recover everything, but the mess that was made of that SD card's file structure was impressive.)  However, since I had ordered two of these units, I had a spare!  Maybe it would work.  Ummm, no, it didn't.  At all.

Well, not to be deterred, I figured that I'd just erred by buying these from the wrong seller; it's not unusual for ultra-cheap stuff from Hong Kong to be cheap because it's the rejects from honorable father-in-law's factory, of which some are OK and some are not so OK, but we can afford to make customer happy by replacing because we pay so little.  And that works acceptably for both parties if the minimum return shipping isn't $11, which is more than I'd paid for the units.  So the smart move was to ditch 'em and move on after griping to the seller and getting the expected "Happy to replace, here is address to return.  So sorry." message.

So I found a different seller, with recent feedback on the identical item that looked promising, and nearly the same price.  (Actually, slightly cheaper, but what the hey, the feedback looked good.)  Ten days later, I had that version.  And they did, in fact, work better, but they were still limited to 16Gb and smaller (no 32Gb) and they didn't work well with class 10 cards at all.

Hmmm.  Not so good.  Not utterly useless, but still not what was wanted.

So I went looking again, and found the 5 in 1 OTG Smart Card Reader, and the much more brute-simple OTG USB connector/adaptor cable.

The 5 in 1 Smart Card Reader shared a lot of the apparent characteristics of the 3 in 1, in that it had a Type A USB socket, a Micro SD/TF socket, and a regular SD socket.  But this time, all three of the inexpensive units that I ordered at least functioned identically, albeit still with issues relating to 32Gb cards.  No SD cards were harmed in the testing of this device, however, but the build quality still left something to be desired.  The Micro SD socket inside the plastic shell didn't precisely align with the slot for it, so it felt like it was scraping the card when it was inserted; not the kind of tactile result that builds confidence.  At least they weren't the complete fiasco of the first two batches.

But that still left the utterly simple and basic just-a-Type-A-USB-socket  version to try, and therein was a better result found.

Although in fact it was of no greater eventual utility than the 5 in 1 Reader, since it appears that the 16Gb limit is at least in part an Android 4.4 limitation, the device recognition was MUCH faster when something was plugged in.  I'm assuming that this was because the phone's own USB hub was looking directly at the connected device instead of having to rely on the handoff through the external hub of the multi-connector Reader.  With my trusty but somewhat venerable IOGear SD reader plugged into the USB cable, the recognition of the SD card was also much faster - and when I subbed in a regular USB flash drive, the file structure came up essentially right away.  WINNER!

Anyway, here's a shot of the business ends of all three units for comparison:

And since inevitably I got curious about the utter-failure units of the first batch, I popped their cases off, and inside one of them I found an obvious attempt to wire around a problem; there was a jumper added from the Type A socket to one of the cable connection points.  That unit was the least functional of the pair, and having seen evidence that they knew it had problems before they shipped it, my suspicion that those were factory seconds or outright rejects got supporting evidence.  

Anyway, the most important information to take away from this, in my opinion, is that the Android 4.4 OTG feature itself isn't quite ready for prime time, but if you're sufficiently careful not to hand it the only copy of some data that you need transferred to the phone or attached to an email, you have some potentially useful options available to accomplish that.  And the simplest works best, unsurprisingly.