How to fix the USB issue of Samsung Phone continuously disconnecting from PC (useful for GearVR devs)

Today I want to talk about a really annoying issue regarding some smartphones. It is slightly off topic, since it’s not directly a VR topic (and this is a VR blog), but since I use my Samsung Note 4 to do mobile VR… we can say that this is absolutely a VR-related post… can’t we?

The issue is the following: you connect your Samsung phone (in my case a Samsung Note 4, but the issue happens also with the S7 and other models) to a PC and everything works fine. Then you try maybe to move some data (e.g. backup your phone photos to your hard drive… or you try to deploy your APK for an awesome VR game) and suddenly the phone disconnects from the PC. One second later, it reconnects. And then it goes this way, with a connect-disconnect schizophrenia that makes you become completely mad. Even because there’s no exact reason because this happens: sometimes it stays connected more, other times less… but anyway you can’t use it in peace. And for me, during continuous deploy of big APKs of VR applications, this bug has meant an enormous waste of time.

Oculus Rift vs GearVR

After having talked you about the headset you should buy and having made a detailed comparison of GearVR vs Cardboard, today I want to highlight the difference between Oculus Rift and Samsung GearVR.

Both headsets are high-end ones and both are produced with Oculus technologies. The key difference is that the first one is a high-end tethered headset, while the second one is a high-end mobile headset. That is, the first one has to be connected to a VR-ready PC (through HDMI and USB port), while the second one is a piece of plastic that works when you put your Samsung phone inside it.

Samsung GearVR and its companion phones… if you use Note7, game explosions have never been so real!(Image by Oculus)