Well, perhaps I'm mistaken, so rather than risk putting my foot in my mouth, I'll ask you: Does your Samsung allow you to play music while it's connected to the computer for file transfer?

No. It's not Nokia's design, it's your design, the implications of which you don't seem to have fully considered. Nokia's design separates data and power ports, allowing you to power the device regardless of what data connections (in host or device mode) you might be using.

There are three issues here: Using a custom connector, hijacking a data connector standard to serve as a power connector, and combining power and data on one port. The topic of this post regards the third, but you're bringing up the first as though it is an inherent result of fixing the third. It'd be possible to use a different connector for power, and keep the proper separation of power and data. (Of course, there are no non-proprietary standards for connectors of equivalent size, but Nokia has published their standards for the 2mm interface; I don't know of any better power connectors anyway...)

And they don't force you to buy anything; it comes with an AC adapter, and if you need an adapter for any of USB, car, or AC, they're readily available from third parties. Forcing me to buy a USB adapter wouldn't be any better to my mind; it's not like this connector is only available from Nokia. But whatever the case, you buy a new adapter once. You have to deal with choosing between powering the N800 and using a USB device with it every time you use it. (Note that host mode tends to run the battery down pretty quickly if it's not connected to the charger; it's singularly annoying to have to stop what you're doing to charge the battery, and then go back to work.)

Google something innovative like 770 schematic; there are also apparently N800 schematics too (though I had thought there weren't when I posted above...).Yes, but your laptop isn't one of them. Did that ever strike you as odd?

Bringing up examples of devices that suffer no loss of functionality from being connected, and that have only one type of connection, makes it look like you aren't following Martin's or my explanations, but I don't know how to make it any clearer. There's a tradeoff you make by powering over a data link, and in a device as flexible as the N800, it winds up getting pretty ugly.



p.s.

A couple of technical forum points:

• The close tags use slashes, just like sgml or xml, not back-slashes.
• We're using at least a 7-bit encoding, so upper-case letters are quite acceptable.