Our mobile devices provide numerous options for network and power connections. In this video, you’ll learn how to connect your mobile devices using USB, Lightning, NFC, Bluetooth, hotspots, and tethering.
With every person you know and everyone in your organization walking around with a phone, a tablet, or even both of those, we need to have different ways to be able to connect these devices back to the computers and networks that we normally use. And of course, it seems that each device has a different way of connecting and communicating back to your computer. In this video, we’ll look at wired connectivity, wireless connectivity, and all of the different standards and options that you might have available on today’s mobile devices.
You’ll find that these connections that we use for these mobile devices are used for more than simply charging the battery. We often might use them for connectivity and synchronization of the data on these devices. You might want to back up what’s on that device or use it as a way to identify that the device is really yours. One of the most common ways to connect these mobile devices is using USB or the Universal Serial Bus. These are standard connections that we’ve used for years and years. And of course, the connectors themselves have changed a bit as time has gone on.
You’ll find that there are different types of connections for USB. For older devices, you may find the mini and micro USB plugs are very popular. These were certainly used on older mobile devices, but you may find even devices in use today are still using these very specific USB types. You may find, of course, that our mobile devices are getting smaller and smaller, but these interfaces are made for a much larger style of interface.
And although many of our modern devices have migrated away from the micro B plug or the mini B plug, you may still use the USB type-A connection to plug into your computing device, like your desktop computer or your laptop computer. More modern devices are still using the universal serial bus, but they’re using a newer version referred to as USB-C. This describes this physical connection of a USB-C plug. Inside of this connection are 24 pins, and they have the same style of connection, regardless of how you might plug it in.
This can easily replace the older USB 2.0 connection all the way up to the latest standard of USB, and we can even put different types of signals on this wire, even though they are all using the same type of connector as its physical interface. For example, you might find that this USB connection is used for more than just serial connectivity. You could see DisplayPort, HDMI, and thunderbolt all can use that single connector to be able to transmit video, data and other information.
USB-C was designed to be a connector that’s easy to use because you can plug it in any orientation, and it also supports a higher speed than the older USB style connectors that we used to use. If you’re using an older mobile device used by Apple, you may not be using a USB connection. You may instead be using a proprietary connection from Apple, known as a lightning connector. This lightning connector has eight pins, and it’s commonly used for older iPhone and iPad devices.
Lightning was introduced to resolve a number of problems with the older USB connection standard. For example, it supported a higher power output so it could charge your phones and your tablets a little bit faster. It can be inserted either way, so you don’t have to keep moving the connector back and forth, and up and down to try to find the right connection. And this relatively simple design made it easy to be able to use this across many different devices.
The challenge, of course, is that you might be using or supporting a number of different mobile devices from a number of different manufacturers. So you may be walking around with a lot of different connector types and cables inside of your bag, just to be able to support all of these different components. This might change going forward as we move towards a single USB-C connector type, instead of using these many and very different connections.
If you want to communicate wirelessly, there are also a number of options available on your mobile device. One of those options is NFC, or Near Field Communication. NFC is commonly used to transmit a little bit of data over a very short connection. NFC is often built into your phone, your tablet, and your smartwatch, and it’s often used as payment systems for paying something at a point-of-sale terminal. Or you might use it as identification to be able to gain access through a particular door, or to be able to transfer information from one phone to another.
Some organizations might have a sensor on the wall, and they use NFC in a watch or a phone to be able to act as an access control. So instead of walking around with an ID card or separate access card, you can simply use the phone that you’re carrying anyway. If you’re using wireless headsets or wireless keyboards and mice, then you’re probably using Bluetooth. Bluetooth allows us to connect devices over a high-speed network at relatively short distances. Often, we refer to this as a Personal Area Network or a PAN.
This is commonly used for devices that we would personally use on that mobile device, things like tethering your smartphone to be able to connect wirelessly, or using it to connect wireless headphones or headsets. All of these types of Bluetooth communications are designed for the individual, although it is possible to connect multiple phones and devices together using this Bluetooth networking technology.
Another useful mobile connection type is to use your mobile phone as an internet router. If we have many people connecting to our mobile phone for internet access, we refer to that as a hotspot. If we simply have one device that is connecting to this mobile phone, and that is the only device that’s able to use that phone, we often refer to that as tethering. This is functionality that’s commonly associated with the software in your phone and the capabilities from your phone provider. So you may want to contact your mobile provider for your telephone and find out if a hotspot functionality is something that you can use on your mobile device.