Recently, I have been entering large amounts of data on to my Motorola Android mobile phone and I have become increasingly frustrated by the screen keyboard. I remembered plugging a manual keyboard into my Tesco Hudl tablet and I wondered if such a device existed for a mobile phone. It seems that there are specific devices but there are alternative, cheaper solutions:
Connect USB keyboard to Android Device
Connect Bluetooth keyboard to Android
Connect PC keyboard to Android (WiFi)
I tried one of my spare Bluetooth keyboards but it wasn’t recognised by my phone.
I have used USB OTG in the past and have a few adapters but they are all micro USB connectors to USB A females and my previous and current phones have USB C sockets so haven’t used them for a while.
These days I tend to transfer data and notes from either Google Keep, Google Drive or OneDrive so I can enter them on my computer and they are automatically transfered to my phone.
My new laptop with Win11 keeps suggesting that I can connect directly to my phone to use all its facilities so that might be an easier avenue to explore. It requires an app and I haven’t bothered
Have you trouble shooted the connectivity problem? It could be something as simple as the battery is low on the keypad.
My experience is that physical connections add connectivity issues. For example, my wifes charging cable stopped connecting to her phone last night. The cable seems to be fine on my phone & tablet, but will not work on her phone. And that is the reason when using physical connections, that I always have 2 or 3 spares available.
I have not used an On The Go adaptor for a keyboard, but have used one for a radio receiver dongle & found that it worked well, but like a charger cable was prone to not working every so often. Also I find OTG’s are not as simple to set up as Bluetooth connections. OTG’s are not hard to set up, just not as simple as a Bluetooth connection.
TBH, I didn’t try very hard with the keyboard - it’s a Dell Multi-Device Wireless Keyboard and Mouse - KM7120W and may need a few buttons pressing - I’ll have to find the manual:
So I found the manual … and I had to click the selector button on the keyboard a couple of times and blindly enter a key code to interface with the phone but it seems to have worked OK - I created and entered text using Google Docs …
This is the sort of form that requires accurate data entry:
Not really what your looking for BUT, I hate the tiny lettered wee keyboards on phones. So I go into the Playstore and download the Classic Big Lettered one, makes all the difference.
I’ve just entered the latest batch of shopping onto the “best before” app using the keyboard/mouse combo - it took only half the time and there were only a tenth of the mistakes …
The OTG cables (2) arrived today - plugged one into my phone - plugged a USB keyboard into the other end - keyboard recognised immediately by the phone - accepted a couple of defaults and it was good to go …
