My second post... I am not a former or present Nokia customer, however I've been super fascinated by the N900. I love the idea of owning the first phone form factor device with a desktop class operating system. I've been salivating over it. I've been reading every news clip and article I can find since I found about the n900 about a month ago. I've been envisioning what I could do with a device with a fully hackable fully enabled OS. I was fully ready to become a Nokia customer until this thread...

I heard it mentioned in some places that USB host wouldn't be available out of the box but would be hackable. That was enough for me. I follow some walkthroughs maybe on this site and I'm good to go with USB! I can hook up my USB printer at home to it, my USB keyboard, my USB video capture device, USB hard drive etc. Hell, they have USB for just about anything.

And now I read this thread and find out I can't do any of that! Ack! I saw some early posts mentioning a use case?

My use case is that I want to throw out my laptop. I want to have a station at my desk at work with my monitor, USB keyboard, USB mouse, USB printer, etc (attached through a USB hub and then over to the n900). Then, I want to get open office going as was demonstrated on this site on the n8xx series. I want to at least try to use an N900 as my working computer, as Nokia advertised. Then at the end of my workday I simply unplug my N900 and head home and I can access all of my work information and programs on a local device. I don't need VNC, SSH or anything clunky like that. I don't need a cell signal or wireless router to get my work info.

My work around is that I'm now going to have a buy Bluetooth everything which adds another couple hundred bucks to my costs. I can barely afford a $550 US phone as it is... Furthermore, how many of the gazillion USB devices am I going to miss out on now? How long is it going to take transfer files now? Bleh, I'm pissed... I agree with some others who say it isn't worth calling the n900 a true mobile computer unless it has USB host. I among those who will now be waiting to buy until USB host can be demonstrated as working. Otherwise, I'll be shopping for the first device that can deliver that functionality.

I know the tendency is to think 2 posts and he is complaining blah blah... he's a troll, but I'm not. I just really really really want USB host and it truly is a deal breaker for me!

BTW, thank you everyone for this awesome forum. When/if I jump on to the Maemo bandwagon, your site will be an incredible resource. In fact, I've already learned a lot about the N900 through my reading here.