Using Flash Drives With Your Phone

There’s never enough space on your smartphone, is there? If you’re like me, you have tons of photos and videos in there, not to mention ebooks and other documents. So what do you do if you need to send a lot of photos or a really long video from your phone to somewhere else?

You could use cloud storage like iCloud or Google Drive. But there’s another option: a flash drive. Yes, you can use a flash drive with your smartphone. But it’s not quite the same as using a flash drive with a computer…

Android and flash drives

Getting more storage space on your Android phone is pretty easy. Many Android phones have a slot to insert a micro SD card. But the downside is you have to take the case off your phone and get some sort of pin to take the micro SD card out. Then you’ll probably need an adapter to insert that tiny card into the SD slot on your computer. Or you might have a phone that can’t use a micro SD card, like the newer models in the Samsung Galaxy S series. It’s just easier to use a flash drive, just like in a computer.

Here’s how it works. A computer acts as a host to a flash drive. In other words, when you insert a flash drive into your computer’s USB port, the computer tells the flash drive what to do. But a smartphone can’t do this. That’s where a technology called On-The-Go, or OTG, comes in. A special OTG adapter not only physically connects a traditional flash drive to your smartphone, it tells your smartphone how to communicate with the flash drive so you can transfer files back and forth.

You could also buy a flash drive that can plug directly into your smartphone. SanDisk makes a line of flash drives that are compatible with Android devices. Before I plugged mine into my phone, I installed the SanDisk Memory Zone app.

iPhones and flash drives

iPhones have so many good features, but they have two major inconveniences. The first is the inability to add more storage space. There has never been an iPhone that had space for a memory card. The second is their incompatibility with Windows. For example, you want to copy the videos from your iPhone to someone else’s Windows computer – but then you realize that AirDrop doesn’t work with Windows. If you want to transfer files directly from your iPhone, a flash drive is the best way to do it.

Unlike Android phones, there is no reliable way to use a cable to attach a flash drive to an iPhone. However, SanDisk does make flash drives made for Lightning ports. I have the SanDisk iXpand Flash Drive Go for iPhone & iPad. When you first plug the it into your iPhone, the phone will ask you to install the SanDisk iXpand Drive app.

It’s always handy to have an extra flash drive around, even with your smartphone. As a bonus, these tips also apply to Android tablets and iPads, too.