Hello,
This does not directly relate to android or android devices but as this seems to be one of the more active communities, I thought I should give it a shot here.
I’m Wondering why the USB C socket and plug have the geometry they have. To me, it seems like the more complex hardware is located in the socket which is located on the more expensive device compared to the cable. Firebolt (is that the apple standard’s name?) seem to handle it the opposite by having the flat plug with bare contacts.
Background is that I have frequently had issues with charging my phone due to dust or other dirt getting suck in the socket. Lacking adequate household items, I had to use a small screw driver to get the dirt out, which I think in general a bad idea.
Are there any technical reasons to have the flat contact in the center of the usb socket rather than the plug?
The problem is that the socket will always have the mechanical retainers for all sorts of plugs. This was a problem for example in the shitty Nokia (HMD Global) phones that used the literal cheapest half-sockets it could find. The retaining tabs wore out and the entire phone socket had to be replaced.
But yes, the smaller retaining pins on USB C will wear out the plug first. Apple Lightning cables will wear out at the phone side instead of the plug side. The difference is that Apple requires Lightning certification on all of their cables meaning that shitty out of spec Chinese crap can’t ruin your port as easily. They worked around bad design with legal restrictions. This was also a play by Apple to restrict charging to whatever they want with proprietary protocol.
USB-C is also grounded from the shielding around the connector, that is huge for pushing higher speeds also. Lighting is limited to 2010 speeds, but generally on phones that doesn’t matter.
For your dirt problem, a smaller toothpick works fine and I have used that method many times to get fuzz and dirt out of my port. Don’t use metal. Generally you will be fine with metal because GND and high voltage are both right next to high speed data lines so it will simply pull the data line high or low, pull data lines to each other, or temporarily toggle CC/SBU pins. Not a big deal, but if you go diagonally you can short something that would burn out supporting components, so I would recommend wood or plastic.
Great response, thanks!
I know it’s not your main point, but speed does matter, at least for some users.
It’s not often, but I regularly have to move relatively large amounts of data (20-40GB) between my phone and pc, sometimes (but not always ) in small batches (~4GB) with a ~10min breaks between to check stuff.
With this process already annoying because of MTP and the way windows file transfers work (no resume/retry over MTP, linux handles it way better) having a high speed connection make it a bit more manageable.
It’s a niche use-case, not very important, but it’s something I wanted to share.
Fair point, I have had to do that while transferring music files but most if not almost all Apple users have thouroughly drank the kool-aid of owning nothing and streaming everything from the cloud.
Linux has its own file transfer issues. For example both Thunar and Nautilus had issues around 2014 era where transferring a lot of small files instead of few large ones would completely hang the file browser and transfer. 2 different systems with different distros. I tried every fix in the book, but I had to use rsync for a long while just to transfer small files like music.
Nowadays it seems like that isn’t a problem. Certainly not with dolphin but windows still has that same MTP problem.