This thing is absolutely great for the price but my experience is not quite as good as 45wheelgun. The device contains a portrait cradle with micro usb plug, a light show that reminds me of the dormitory room, a memory stick slot, a slot i don't recognize called m2, an sd card slot, a micro sd card slot, two USB-A out ports, a mini USB in port and a round hole I don't recognize which might be for a screw or might be for some sort of power supply. Also in the box is about a one foot USB-A to USB-mini cable.
I was surprised by the mini USB in. I was planning to power it from a wall charging adapter that's about 6 feel away, but my cable is USBmicro. The included cable doesn't reach so my choices were a docking station on the floor (does not make sense) or plug the USB cable into my laptop. That worked but it mounted the phone's internal memory and eternal SD as drives on the laptop which isn't really what I had in mind. Also, when plugged in to the laptop, Galaxy Charging Current shows 466ma if I'm reading it correctly, which does not seem enough to keep up with the power needed to keep the screen on, let alone do any charging.
The USB micro plug in the cradle is pretty long. If I had a thick case that would be good news. However I am using the flip case which does not add any thickness at all on the bottom. The USB plug bottoms out maybe 80% of the way in and the phone does not come in contact with the bottom of the cradle. It is held up by the plug and supported by the cradle back. .The phone is able to wobble maybe five or ten degrees to the right or left. If I bump it or jiggle the desk it may flop from left-leaning to right-leaning (no political jokes please) while my laptop makes device connected/device disconnected noises. I think I am going to have to build up the cradle bottom somehow to keep it steady.
I inserted a micro SD card. It went in pretty easily and immediately showed up as drive E on my laptop. I used ES File Explorer on the phone to look for it under local. I found USBDriveA through USBDriveF but none of them showed the micro SD card. When I used ES File Manager to show my laptop's drives, the E drive was not shown. I was unable to find any way to use the docking station to mount the microSD card on the phone.
I then inserted an SD card into the docking station. This was a little challenging because it had to be inserted with the contacts up which is very unusual, and it did not go in very far. The SD card did not appear on either the phone or laptop so far as I can tell. If I removed both the SD and the micro SD and then inserted just the SD, it came up on the laptop as drive E (same drive the micro SD was till I removed it) Again, I could not mount the SD card on the phone and the phone was unable to see it mounted on the laptop. But I could have used the laptop to copy files from the micro SD in the dock onto the other micro SD in the phone.
I connected an external 500gb USB hard drive with a Y cable (two USB-A to the host, one USB mini to the drive. It immediately started buzzing and clicking but neither the laptop not the phone seemed to be using it. Neither Windows Explorer nor ES File Explorer were able to see the drive.When I pulled the phone out of the cradle the buzzing and clicking continued which means to me that either Windows was using the disk or that the disk chose this moment to run some diagnostics
In my basement there may be a 6 foot mini USB cable, if so I will tre the dock on AC power and see if anything's different..
UPDATED the reason for the Y cable is to give the disk more than one port's worth of power. Since the whole docking station was running off of a single port and was powering the phone and an sd card, the disk cannot possibly have been receiving adequate power. The buzz/click must have been the disk struggling to run on inadequate power.
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