Hi!
I'm Bernie Thompson; I'm the Founder of Plugable Technologies.
Today we got in our Galaxy S8 phones, and we have both the S8 and the S8+ from Samsung.
It's pretty exciting!
It's a pretty cool phone.
It's got a screen that wraps around the edges.
It's a beautiful physical design.
But what we were most interested in is the fact that it has a USB-C port at the bottom.
And you may know, if you've seen our other videos, that USB-C is an exciting new technology,
that has a lot of complexity to it, but it's capable of a whole bunch of new things in
terms of graphics functionality and charging in addition to being backwards compatible
with all of the USB stuff that has come in the last decade or two.
As soon as we got these phones we wanted to try them out and see what worked and what
didn't, and I wanted to relate that to you.
We're using all off-the-shelf USB-C compliant products here, and we wanted to know which
ones would work with the Galaxy.
The first scenario that's really interesting to me is I would love to just take my phone
into a conference room and be able to do presentations.
And here we are!
I have a Plugable USB-C to HDMI Adapter.
So that will be compatible with most conference room setups, and all I need to do is walk
in with my phone and with this adapter.
Now I can do anything that I would normally do on the phone and it's going to duplicate
that to the screen on the TV.
It's really nice for using my phone as my only presentation device, and there's ways
to affect the display; we're doing just the vertical here.
So that's really exciting!
Most of our USB-C graphics adapters that use DisplayPort over USB-C as the underlying graphics
method work with it.
So we have a USB-C to HDMI adapter, USB-C to DVI adapter, USB-C to DisplayPort cable...So
many graphics connectors!
Interestingly, our USB-C to VGA adapter did not work.
We actually have another product coming, a USB-C to VGA Cable that did work.
We'll make sure to put notes in the description of this video to explain exactly what worked
and what didn't.
We don't know why the USB-C to VGA Adapter was the one exception that didn't work.
It could be some sort of compatibility quirk that maybe either we or Samsung need to work
out.
The phone itself of course has cellular data and WiFi data, but if you need to do something
where you're really transferring a lot of data, obviously a wired network is going to
get you several times the performance of anything that you would be able to do wirelessly.
Plug in this USB-C Gigabit Ethernet Adapter, and now there's a section in the settings,
that talk about the Ethernet connection, and you can establish that connection.
Now you've got a higher performance, lower latency wired connection to be able to transfer
a lot of data to and from your Galaxy S8.
It may be only matters when you've got large videos to transfer or possibly certain types
of network gaming, but it's still good to know that the standard, off-the-shelf USB-C
functionality works that way.
Similarly, we've got the ability to add storage to the Samsung.
So, a USB-C Flash Memory Card Reader, and even (if you want to kind of get crazy), you
can actually take a hard drive and connect those up via USB-C to the Samsung.
Probably less likely to do that.
This is the cable that comes with the Samsung phone.
It does interestingly come with a USB-C to USB-A connector.
So it's really designed to work with all of the existing chargers out there.
This is an interesting Plugable product.
This is a Plugable Power Bank that also has the AC portion of the charger built into it.
What's really cool about this is it's got two charging ports on the bottom.
I love to carry this with me, when I'm traveling on the road to hotels and things like that,
because if I plug this into the wall, and then plug two devices in there (typically
my phone and maybe my Kindle) everything will be charged by morning: the battery inside,
and all of the devices attached.
Then I'll just unplug it in the morning, take it out onto a conference floor or into my
meetings and then I've got a 5,000 mA power bank that doesn't need to be plugged in to
charge my phone.
If I run short, I can plug it in any time, so it's one unit with a collapse-able set
of US power prongs, that does everything that I need as far as charging goes.
So I just go ahead and plug this into the Samsung phone, and it pops up with it showing
that it's charging there once I shake the adapter and you see a green LED show up there.
Now it shows charging there on the Samsung.
So now, in the scenario, it's drawing from the power bank battery here.
So, there you go!
The new Samsung Galaxy S8 and S8+.
It's really exciting that it's a USB-C connector, and that charging, and DisplayPort over USB-C,
and a bunch of legacy USB devices all work on its USB-C port.
If you have any questions at all about any of the Plugable products that I mentioned
here (or any other ones) feel free to comment below.
We'll be happy to help!
Thanks!