Fig. 1 shows an Android phone connected to a Flash drive. Follow the steps below to connect any Flash drive to your Android phone.
Step 1. Buy an OTG cable. These cables are easily available in the market. You can even make your own OTG cable by following the connections mentioned in Fig. 3.
Step 2. Plug the Flash drive into the USB OTG cable and connect the cable into your phone’s microUSB port. Some phones come equipped with USB OTP drivers and will immediately jump into USB host mode from where you can access gallery and music. If, however, nothing happens, you need to root your device and install a free app from the Google Play store.
Step 3. You will first need to find specific instructions for your make, model and carrier from such websites as The Unlockr.com and XDA developer forums to root your device. Once the device is rooted, install StickMount app from the Google Play store as shown in Fig. 4. Now connect the Flash drive using OTG cable to your phone. Check ‘use by default’ and tap OK when Android pops up a prompt that says ‘Open StickMount when this USB device is connected.’
After your device successfully mounts, you will see a notification from StickMount that displays a message like ‘Active mounts: /sda/usbStorage/sda1’ to let you know that your USB storage drive is ready for reading/writing.
Take a screen shot
If you are using Android 4.0 or later, this is easy. Just press and hold the volume down and power buttons at the same time. You will see an animation on the screen as shown in Fig. 5, indicating that the screen photo was saved. Android will save the image to your gallery.
Get hidden phone information
Dial *#*#4636#*#* on your Android phone and it will give you information about phone and battery as shown in Fig. 6. The menus might differ for different cell phones.
Get GTalk Service Monitor
Dial *#*#8255#*#* on your Android phone and it will open GTalk Service Monitor (Fig. 7). Google Talk Service Monitor in Android mobile phones will monitor Google Talk host address and port, your Google JID, your device ID, GTalk connection status, your connection history, your current GTalk presence (available, idle or invisible) and many other things such as GTalk heartbeat status.
Get IMEI number(s)
You can dial *#06# on your Android phone to get its IMEI number(s). You should always make a note of these numbers. In case your mobile gets stolen, you will need these numbers to lodge an FIR in the police station. Fig. 8 shows a screen of IMEI numbers as an example.
The author is B.Tech in electronics and communications from GGSIP University, Delhi
