What kind of USB controller does the iPhone 4 have?
Just curious if they stuck in a USB 3.0 controller to be ahead of the game knowing it would be backwards compatible.
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Yes, there is USB onboard, since the very first iPhone. There's also been Firewire in the past. Pinout image
Fairly unlikely to be USB3, though, I'd guess it's USB2.
However, it's certain that Apple have made it very difficult to access.
Currently with jailbreaking and the iPad camera connection kit (an adapter which makes the USB pins of the dock connector available via a USB socket) you can only get a USB keyboard to work, you can't use mass storage devices or external devices such as MIDI keyboards or audio interfaces.
It's a shame, really, the USB controller is in there! You're just not allowed to use it. Perhaps in a future iOS update it will be made available.
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Your correct the Apple dock connector has USB support in it and it's 2.0. - As to supporting other storage and MIDI Iomega makes a backup unit (http://go.iomega.com/en-us/products/smar...) and here's a MIDI device (http://line6.com/midimobilizer/) just to name two devices I know of at least five other external storage for the iPhone and one other I/O interface system for medical use. There's a ton of I/O stuff out there for iPhones or iPad to do just about anything - If you sign up with Apple's hardware developer group for free, and you can get the all of the info to connect to the dock connector to build your own product, No jail-breaking needed!
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First the iPhone has always had USB support via it's dock connector. Sorry to say it's limited to the 1.0 or 2.0 spec in speed depending on your model of phone.
The new iPhone 5 now supports USB 2.0/3.0 depending on what you connect to via the new Lightning port.
As to the USB controller is part of a Apple custom chip heres theiFixIt iPhone 3GS teardown Check out step 11 diagram So you really can't swap it out (even in the newer iPhone 4/4S models).
The first gen of iPods had Firewire support then USB was added about the same time the iPhone was introduced and later Firewire support was dropped.
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iPhone and iOS has absolutely zero USB support.
However Android and several other OS's do, yet none support USB 3 as it's not released yet, so before it's finalized and ready for production it's rather pointless. Otherwise all computers would have it.
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I think what I meant was their custom 30 pin connector is a custom USB cable, so it seems there must be some sort of USB interface, even if custom, to connect the device to a computer.
But even still, USB 3.0 isn't fully baked, so why be an early adopter. Thanks.
If you found my answer to be acceptable can you please mark it as so so this question can be marked as resolved? Thanks.
