What are the news that USB-C will bring us to Android?

USB-C

Yesterday the new Google Chromebook Pixel 2 was introduced, and this week Apple's MacBook arrived. What do they have in common? Both include USB-C ports, which seems to be coming to Android very soon as well. But what are those USB-C ports? How are they going to change the Android landscape and what features will they bring? We explain everything to you in this post.

With Google and Apple as flags

It seems incredible that they have managed to get companies like Google and Apple to join forces to both use a port that is actually a standard. Generally, this is more typical of Google, but not so much of Apple. If the Cupertino company has installed a USB-C port, regardless of its own, it is because it truly trusts that this port is the future, it is of quality, and you have to bet on it. And probably because we will also see it in future iPhones. The case of Google is similar, although much more expected. The company usually follows the standards, and in this case it was not going to be less. Perhaps the biggest surprise has been that the company has claimed that it will soon arrive on Android devices. That means that we will probably see it from now on in all electronic devices.

No guidance

I do not know about you, but I have charged a few devices for connecting the USB cable wrong. This has happened to me mainly because there are companies that decide, for some strange reason, to install the USB, miniUSB or microUSB connectors backwards. In any case, that is going to wipe out USB-C. For a long time, this cable had a goal, and that is that it was not necessary to connect the cable with a specific orientation. It is something similar to what Apple had already achieved with the Lighting connector, but with a standard cable that all the companies that wanted could start using. Its size is very similar to that of the microUSB, so that will not vary too much.

USB-C

A new energy medium

For any android user it is obvious that USB-C cables will serve to supply power to smartphones. In fact, this was already the main function of the microUSB cable that we used, to be able to charge the smartphone through this cable. However, there are news related to USB-C. Basically, the cable supports a power greater than 100 watts, with a voltage of 20 volts and an intensity of 5 amps. With this power, you can go much further in terms of charging faster batteries, higher capacity batteries or powering devices with higher energy consumption, such as a very powerful tablet, for example. Also a laptop, although that is not what concerns us now. Of course, it will serve to charge different devices at the same time.

Power from mobile to tablet

However, the great novelty, which many will see as a true feature to highlight, is that this cable will allow two devices to be connected with a USB-C cable, and one can recharge the battery of the other. This is especially useful when we carry a tablet, with a battery of much more capacity, we have not used it almost, but our smartphone is running out of battery.

Higher data transmission speed

Obviously, a new cable was going to entail a higher speed to transmit. That means that we can connect our smartphone by cable to the computer to transfer its data, such as photographs or videos, much faster, reaching about 10 Gbps in some cases at most, and thus almost doubling USB 3.0, which in turn was faster than USB 2.0 that many still use normally. But of course, you may think that transmitting data is not relevant for you because you almost never transfer the videos or photos to the computer, and when you do it it does not take so long. However, this has many other applications.

Cables

One video output

Although we have already seen that some Android smartphones use the microUSB socket as a video output, the truth is that the USB-C was already designed with the aim that it would serve as a video output. Thus, we can use it as a classic VGA socket, an HDMI output, or even a DisplayPort socket. Thus, we can even get an image to a 5K screen from a smartphone. It remains to be seen how the latter will work, but what is clear is that the USB-C cable gives us much greater versatility than we had so far, and eliminates limitations. With a single port, our smartphones will have many more capabilities than before.

Not compatible with traditional USB

Perhaps one of its negative developments has to do with the fact that this new cable or connector will not be compatible with what until now we could call traditional USB. We will not be able to use a microUSB to connect it to a USB-C port, as is obvious. However, it was also something to be expected, and more when taking into account that some of the features that arrive include very relevant physical modifications. Be that as it may, at some point this generational leap was going to have to be made, and it seems that it has coincided at a time when different companies have wanted to decide to choose this standard as the best for them. In any case, it will be possible to use an adapter, which in the end we will all end up having to be able to make everything we have compatible. There are not many devices that already include this connector. The Nokia N1, the new tablet of the Finnish company, has been one of the first, along with the Apple MacBook and Chromebook Pixel 2. But surely many more will begin to arrive in a very short time. There is talk of the next Google Nexus as one of them, although it is likely that even this year we speak of many more than just one.


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