Japanese company makes $16 USB-C cable that rotates 360 degrees — cable is approximately 3 feet long and offers 240W power delivery and USB 2.0 transfer speeds
It's probably not just possible to get the number of pins required for USB 3.x connected and still retain the trick swivel mechanism. Or at least not while keeping its little traces and wipers large enough to not just catch fire under Power Delivery loads as well.
What do you mean? USB 2.0 speeds are annoying, for example if you're transferring multiple high-bitrate 1080/2K videos to watch on your phone, but the concept works.
People don't really do it anymore because "files" have largely been abstracted away or they are on cloud storage, but at least on Android I've never had an issue with file transfer. Can't speak for iOS.
The issue I've had with Android was, for awhile at least, it stopped allowing you to mount the phone's storage as a file system on a PC using normal USB mass storage and wanted to specifically use, what? SMP or something? Something about old standards for digital cameras (similar to the reason why the camera roll on all phones is stored in a folder called DCIM) that continues to pollute smart phones.
My guess is the DCIM mount is for things like photo kiosks designed to plug any photo device in to print pictures. It would kinda suck to have a smartphone that couldn't talk to such a system, but a modern one could easily get around that now, and digital cameras are far less prevalent.
As for mounting it as mass storage, usually there is a notification you tap into that gives you options. Most of the time it defaults to charge only and you have to opt in to full storage access to prevent plugging in to some random "charging station" and have it copy data to or from your phone.
Yeah, that's the default that I get (and use). It is tied to old digital cameras.
Agreed, it is pretty annoying. You can still use it for file transfer though. And I am sure you can get around it (I've just never bothered to look into it).
Does your phone not just have the option to connect as a file system? I'm on stock Android on an old pixel, and mine still does. But I'm worried I'll lose it next upgrade.
So basically, it's great for charging and useless for most other things. I'm fine with that since I never use my charging wires for anything else anyway.