What Is OTG And What Can It Do For You

When you are shopping for an Android device, you may note that there is a USB OTG mark on the product packaging. Do you know what is OTG and its function? How to check if your Android device supports USB OTG? MiniTool will show you all this information in this post.

What Is OTG?
When you shop for smartphones or tablets, you may see the package of the product and note there is an item of USB OTG. What does it mean?

The full name of USB OTG is USB On-The-Go. You can just call it OTG. It is a specification that is first used in late 2001.

What is the OTG function? With it, you can connect the USB devices, such as USB flash drives, digital cameras, etc. to tablets or smartphones. However, this is not the only function of USB OTG.

It also allows the supported devices to switch back and forth between host and device. To be specific, when a removable USB medium is connected to your mobile phone using the USB OTG, your mobile phone is served as the host device. When it is connected to your computer via a USB cable, it is just a USB massage storage device.

How to Check if Your Android Device Supports USB OTG?
Many popular Android phones and tablets support USB OTG, such as Samsung phones. If you don’t sure about it on your device, there are still other ways that can be used to check whether your device has USB OTG function.

The first and easiest method is to check the packaging of your device. The manufacturer should present the USB OTG logo on the product packaging.

However, if you have thrown away the product packaging, you can use a USB OTG checker instead to check whether your device has the USB OTG function. If you just search for such a tool from the Google Play Store. After downloading and installing the USB OTG checker on your Android device, you can run the app to make it check USB OTG functionality on the device. Besides, it can also tell you which features work on your device.

Additionally, you can also check the USB OTG information in Settings of your Android device. The specific paths to make such verification may vary in different Android devices. But, for most Android devices, it is under the System section in Settings.

What Can the USB OTG Function Do for You?
The USB OTG functions on different Android devices are various. Not all devices support all the same peripherals. But. Most Android devices support general functions.

If you want to use your Android tablet as a laptop, you can use the USB OTG function to connect a USB hub, a mouse, and a keyboard. You can even connect a video game controller to your Android tablet.

Besides, if your Android device runs out of space, you will need to extend the Android storage space. You can use the USB OTG function to connect a USB flash drive or even an external hard drive to add more space to your Android device.

Here are some other things you may be interested in:

Some USB OTG connections are reported to support USB 3.0 speeds.

Some USB drives can be directly connected to your Android device using USB OTG, while other drives that are designed with a standard USB-A connector will need a USB OTG adapter to establish the connection.

About The Author
Position: Columnist

Stella has been working in MiniTool Software as an English Editor for more than 4 years. Her articles mainly cover the fields of data recovery including storage media data recovery and phone data recovery, YouTube videos download, partition management, and video conversions.