How to Connect Your New Tablet or Smartphone to Your TV

Much of the multimedia content we visualize enjoyed them daily in our personal mobile devices, whether a smartphone or tablet. Modern televisions also advance unstoppable in providing digital content and adopting new technologies.

It was inevitable that both ecosystems they had a rallying point: the ability to share content from your smartphone or tablet on a TV. We can do this in many different ways, some more interesting or accessible than others.

The Smart TV makes it much easier to connect your smartphone or tablet to your television, something unthinkable 10 years ago with old televisions and mobile phones with which we had.

As often occurs, the first connections between smartphones and televisions were able to finish by using cables that transmitted the video signal being HDMI the most popular. The micro-HDMI or standard ports  MHL and SlimPort have been the most prominent in this regard.

Image Source: Google
Image Source: Google

Quickly, the use of WiFi and new technology implementations TVs were turning the tables, and now it is much simpler, faster and less cumbersome to share the signal or media files from your smartphone or tablet using the local or individual network of own each device.

Let’s review the best ways to connect our smartphone or tablet to your television today:

Using the WiFi network itself and a TV with Smart TV

If we have a Smart TV and a next – generation smartphone, the applications themselves of both devices will make “link” so that we can enjoy all the multimedia content to visualize on your smartphone.

A clear example is the YouTube Android app, which allows us to make a direct streaming or “cast” of content that we’re seeing on YouTube directly on a TV with Smart TV that is on the same WiFi network (or local) of our smartphone. We will not have to install anything or configure anything, except pressing a button.

Using DLNA applications

Image Source: Google
Image Source: Google

One of the ways most currently used to link devices is through the DLNA protocol, a very comfortable environment with which to share and enjoy content within a local area, ie, in our small local home network formed by our computer, TV or smartphone/tablet.

Applications that use the DLNA system allow us to be able to share “libraries” of files quickly and we can reproduce them in a television or compatible device. If our TV supports DLNA (the vast majority of current Smart TV do), you can install applications such as iMediaShare or Plex on our phone and indicate

which files to share. We can watch our personal videos, photos or music directly on the TV with a couple of steps.

Using Miracast

Miracast is a type of network peer-to-peer (device to device) using WiFi connection to your TV and smartphone to transmit real – time image. This allows us to use the TV screen literally like the smartphone but making a replica of what we see on the screen of the smartphone since we can not control anything using the TV.

This type of connection was very popular a few years ago, and many TVs today still incorporating such functionality but is less relevant than other connections most used currently (as DLNA or “cast” live content).

Using content adapters like Chromecast

Image Source: Google
Image Source: Google

A widely used today reshares between our TV and smartphone, tablet or computer is to use an adapter as Chromecast, the most popular of all, a creation of Google.

Thanks to this device, we can create a real – time streaming content we see on the mobile device using the official application Chromecast or the various applications that appear compatible with this functionality. It is the ideal option if your TV does not have integrated Smart TV function, and its price is very low.

Using an HDMI cable connection with MHL or SlimPort adapters

Image Source: Google
Image Source: Google

The last option and a favorite of many users who want to perform a high – speed connection between their TVs and smartphones or tablets are to use an HDMI cable directly from your mobile device to the TV.

Using a laptop be an easy task, since many incorporate an HDMI connector directly, but on smartphones and tablets is another matter: it is very difficult to find devices incorporating an HDMI (or micro HDMI) port.

For some years we have solutions as adapters MHL and SlimPort, a pair of technologies that leverage micro USB device to connect external adapters and convert HDMI ports.

The problem is that today, smartphones and modern tablets are leaving to use this way to connect devices to the TV. For example, recent Samsung Galaxy can not use MHL devices (as of old) and SlimPort devices have even less support.

Anyway, we can see which devices compatible with both platforms are looking at the list of official websites, both of MHL, as in that of SlimPort.