Apple’s Lightning to USB connector has ostensibly been about connecting your iPad to a camera to import images directly to your tablet.
Now, with iOS 9.2, it looks like the same adapter can be used on your iPhone to get photos onto your smaller-screened device.
There’s even some evidence that the Lightning to USB adapter works to connect other USB peripherals, like MIDI keyboards or USB-powered microphones. If you’re a musician on the road without access to your iPad, this might be your new best solution.
While the added ability to directly import images to your iPhone from a camera is a great feature, it’s the USB peripheral function that’s bound to get most iOS musicians excited.
With the Lightning to USB adapter plus a powered USB hub, some folks have found a way to connect lower-powered musical equipment to their iPads. iMore’s Serenity Caldwell tested an iPhone 6s with iOS 9.2 on it and found that it also supported such a connection.
The downside (other than a tiny screen that’s hard to use for music creation) is one of power. Apple’s $29 Lightning to USB Camera Adapter will only support 20mA of juice, which is too low for many music devices.
So, for the foreseeable future, the iPad will continue to be the de-facto standard for using the adapter with most music peripherals, but if you need to connect your iPhone to some of the ones that use less power, you’re good to go.
Source: iMore
Rob LeFebvre is an Anchorage, Alaska-based writer and editor who has contributed to various tech, gaming and iOS sites, including 148Apps, Creative Screenwriting, Shelf-Awareness, VentureBeat, and Paste Magazine. Feel free to find Rob on Twitter @roblef, and send him a cookie once in a while; he’ll really appreciate it.
5 responses to “Want USB on your iPhone? There’s an adapter for that”
This always worked on iPhone. Used a USB headset with it all the time for a while. It only recently got the ability to import photos from a camera.
I’ve also used the USB adapter on my iPhone long before 9.2 Like a USB Samson mic I have. Has always worked great. Never needed to import photos though.
Can you use it to EXPORT photos from your iPhone to a USB storage device?
That would be much more useful. Since the new Photos app appeared, photo importing seemed to get even slower and it seems to interfere with using Preview to do it too.
No