OTG cables and USB flash drives

consptheory77 · Mar 16, 2016

I have both an Amazon Fire phone and an Amazon Fire HD tablet. The Fire OS operating reportedly supports OTG - in theory. But I just bought a SanDisk Dual USB 3.0 64GB flash drive, and neither the phone nor the tablet recognizes it. From my survey of other forums, this is said to be normal and expected, that all USB flash drives need power, and that most USB drives require more voltage than the phone/tablet is able to give, especially when the phone/tablet battery is at less than full capacity of its charge, and also when the drive of a higher capacity. In other words, some people were able to get their drives recognized when they used OTG cables, drives that were 16GB or less, and a battery with a charge above 70%. So, is that correct for them to state this, or there another electronic principle involved? And do smaller flash drives real take less power to run?

hang-the-9 · Mar 18, 2016

Simple way to test, get a smaller capacity USB drive of the brand that people said worked. Those things are so cheap now they are basically disposable.

Yes, USB flash drives need power to run, and the phone connection provides less voltage than a computer connection. You can also ask SanDisk support, I'm sure they know what will work and won't.

consptheory77 · Mar 18, 2016

It turns out that OTG is not officially supported on the first to third generations of the Amazon Fire tablet. And the Amazon phone does not seem to support it at all. It's still not clear whether this a limitation of the Fire OS (because the current versions of the operating system itself in theory support OTG) or a hardware limitation, or both, or neither. Because OTG is possible when rooting the 1st to 3rd gen Fire tablets, but still not necessarily reliable. The third and fourth generation of Fire tablets DO support OTG, and I just ordered the current version of the Fire HD 6 in order to to test this out to see how well this feature works. Curiously, OTG or the lack of it is not something which Amazon advertises as a feature of the tablet, but for some of us this is pretty important.

I bought the 3rd gen Fire tablet a year ago because it had a gorgeous IPS pixel dense screen AND Amazon let me buy though an interest free installment plan, $40 a month was easier than $200 at once, I wish they offered more things on installment. But now that the prices of tablets have gone down, I wonder if I should have gone for the Nexus 7 instead. The phone, however, was $100 at the time I bought last year, and for the specs, that's still a value proposition even if the OS is crimped.

consptheory77 · Mar 20, 2016

The problem is first a software problem, only then secondarily it might be a hardware problem. Fire OS version 5 supports OTG, but first to third generation of Fire tablets and the phones don't support any upgrade beyond Fire OS version 4. Thus, the only way you can OTG is by rooting the tablet. In such cases when these previous generations were rooted, they still might not support a stable OTG connection, but that was a hardware issue, not a software issue.

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OTG cables and USB flash drives

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