USB Host Mode On S60 Devices
Widely regarded as the ‘easter egg’ of the Nokia N810 Internet Tablet is the ability to use, with special software, the microUSB port as a host port, enabling the user to plug a USB pen drive, full-sized keyboard, and other USB peripherals into the Tablet and use them as you would on a computer. Thoughtfix went into this recently over at TabletBlog.com, and Vaibhav Sharma at The Symbian Blog has begun wondering why this isn’t possible on the latest S60 devices that have mini- and microUSB ports built-in.
Personally, I could see this being really useful for USB pen drives, to increase the already massive amount of storage that our devices are capable of, but also for USB keyboards. I don’t think a USB mouse would work very well, but who knows. What other uses can you see for this?
Does anyone know if this is something that needs to be supported by the hardware, or is it as simple as writing a piece of software to do this?
Attach cardreader –> move camera pictures to phone –> upload to blog
External storage
I don’t know about programming but i think it is doable, oh and that would ROCK! Imagine uploading pics from a friend’s usb to ur phone with it,…, hehe
Sorry, but the hardware on most (all?) S60 phones just doesn’t support this.
I’ve managed to connect my 250GB External HD to my N800 using USBControl, but I also managed to connect my N73 & N95 8GB using it as well, see http://nokiaaddict.com/2008/03/07/06032008046/
Very handy will traveling.
The technology that does this is callled USB OTG or USB on-the-go. It’s been around for a while, but for some reason manufacturers seem slow to introduce it. The ONLY device that Nokia have equiped with this is the N810. Why not the N95 – or the N96?? Who knows?? Beats ne!
The OTG means that N810 can act in both USB roles, slave and master. You can find more about USB-OTG from http://www.usb.org/developers/onthego/ .
If the port is already there, there’s no reason to not support it. Just the simple ability to plug in a flash drive would be awesome, but USB-based accesory hardware like GPS would be nice too, or anything else you’d like to give its own battery,