This little USB OTG Cable came with my Ainol V9000HDA that I got recently.

It allows a very interesting feature on the Ainol which is to allow the use of a thumbdrive as a file source.

Interesting when you have some media on a USB stick and you can't copy it to the Micro SD card. On battery power you can only use low power consumption things like a thumbdrive, if you wanted to use a something like a hard disk the Ainol needs to be plugged in first.

Here's where this gets interesting. What you see below is my Sony CX-150 camera.

When I bought the camera and realized from the manual that it supported USB OTG which will allow the camera to offload files into an external USB source without the need of a computer. Useful during travels. But the USB OTG cable wasn't included in the box, and buying one from Sony was listed as... RM85... NO FARKING WAY I told myself.

So I went to All IT and bought something that looked like an OTG cable for RM15.

So I brought it back and plugged it into the camera expecting to say a great big FARK YOU to Sony and their over priced cable, but...

Nothing happened when I plugged it in. So thinking that it's because Sony put in some form of proprietary USB OTG controller that looks for some special cable I cursed Sony and forgotten about it.

Now that I've gotten another USB OTG cable I thought what the heck, let me give this another try. So I plugged the cable end and...

EVEN BEFORE I plugged in a device to the other end of the cable. Then after plugging in a thumbdrive and the power (cause the CX-150 will only connect devices when on AC power) I was greeted with this screen.

Well.. my thumbdrive was definitely formatted (and the CX-150 doesn't recognize any NTFS partitions) so I'm gonna guess it wants to create the AVCHD file structure on the thing.

Even though I wasn't actually able to use a USB drive properly but I did prove that the cable works properly, which lead me to another realization.

The fact that I could buy a cable that was marked as an OTG cable yet it didn't work on OTG devices properly would mean that there somewhere down the line there someone must have decided to create a proper standardized cable, and then well someone decide to sell all the non standard surplus.. for RM15.