Follow These Steps to Connect a USB Keyboard to an Android Phone

Tutorial: Keyboard to Android

The traditional keyboards work absolutely fine, at least for me. Whenever I am at my home, I can type in whatever I want, and if you have a keyboard from some of the best companies, you won’t be facing any sort of trouble. But, when I am out of home, it’s not always possible to bring in my laptop. In such situations, I would prefer my Android phone. Well, I am not a fan of touchpad typing, so I’ll probably bring a USB keyboard with me as well.

In this article, I’ll try to explain how you can connect your USB keyboard to the Android phone.

Get the Cable

This is a piece of hardware which is a must and can’t be ignored! For connecting USB keyboards, you should use USB OTG cables. The cable is tiny and can be found in the web stores (Well, your neighboring local store may not have one). Don’t worry about the cost; these don’t cost more than a buck.

On one end of USB OTG, you will see a Micro USB plug to be attached to your phone. The other hand will have a regular sized jack to be plugged into the keyboard.

What Now?

If you have plugged in the keyboard correctly, you should see the keyboard appearing in your screen and you can type in whatever you wish. If you wish to remove the keyboard from the screen, a press on the back button will do that.

Keyboard Layout

This is a problem I have seen many of my friends facing with USB keyboards. You are set with a particular layout and if it changes on the screen to something different, your typing experience won’t be pleasant. To tackle this, you can use an app called External Keyboard Helper. With this, you can change the screen keyboard layout to anything of your choice. There are various options including the most used ones, such as QWERTY and Colemak. The app is not free, but costs a mere $2.50. I bet if you can afford an Android phone, you certainly can buy this app too.

Mounting USB Drives

If you can add a keyboard to your Android phone, why not mount a USB drive as well? You can plug a USB drive with your phone through some cable and then use a free app for mounting purpose. I use StickMount for doing this and the app does not cost anything. However, the app is not compatible with the Android version 4.2, so please take a note of this.

There are not a lot of steps that you need to complete to connect a USB keyboard to your Android phone. However, I still tried covering solutions to possible problems that you can face. If you have any other difficulty, I’ll request you to share your problem through the comments.