Understanding the ways your smartphone can communicate is very handy as it will expand the ways in which you can utilise it. In this article, we are going to look closer at hotspots, tethering and accessories.
Hotspots and tethering
A hotspot in mobile, known as a mobile hotspot is a small device that can be used to access cellular technologies like 3G, 4G, and 4G LTE through Wi-Fi. These devices can be purchased from various vendors out there. such as Verizon, Sprint, AT&T, T-Mobile, etc. They are also typically specific to a certain type of broadband network. The mobile hotspot is basically a router, which routes the traffic between Wi-Fi devices and broadband technologies. This way it provides wireless access to up to five to ten devices simultaneously.
Almost any mobile device can act as a mobile hotspot (of course not the one that does not support the Internet in the first place). This goes from smartphones to tablets. They all can act as portable hotspots. When a mobile device is used in such a way, it is known as Tethering to a cell phone. Usually, when the mobile hotspot is on, it will either consume the data from the shared cellular data plan or the data will be separated from the personal data plan. This depends on the carrier.
To set up a device as a hot spot, you need to have a cellular data plan and connection and need to turn on the hotspot. With this, your phone will be broadcasting a Wi-Fi network. Now the device will be served as a wireless router. Now, any device that needs to connect to this hotspot simply needs to look for this hotspot name or device name from their Wi-Fi network list. You may or may not want to set a password but you can do so depending on your observation.
Accessories
Yes, there are accessories for mobile devices as well. Mobile accessories come in a wide range of features. Some of the mobile accessories that people usually look for are anything with Bluetooth technology. You can easily find high-quality Bluetooth external speakers as well as headsets and blast music while chatting with your friends.
There are also amazing game controllers or gamepads and other accessories available that directly plug into the USB port or connect to the device via Bluetooth. This can turn a tablet into a full-blown gaming platform. There is a special kind of Android device out there which used primarily for full-on gaming platforms and can perform other operations like Android tablets out there. For instance, devices like NVIDIA Shield, ASUS ROG series, and so on. One of the nifty features of Android and some Microsoft mobile devices is, that they offer the flexibility of using an external microSD or miniSD memory cards. This is tremendously useful and you can use it as your mass storage device and never have to worry about the built-in device storage limitation. Unfortunately, Apple devices do not provide such flexibility.