Well, they did mention hw bugs ....

I also got a T|X RMA'd because instead of sucking power through USB it was powering up other (500mA) devices in the hub and heating considerably . Diagnostic was "diode gone bad".

I'd wager the diode wasn't spec'd right. Then again, I recall a former employer receiving truckloads of bad diodes that went into military avionics. Oops. Expensive recall.

Ok, so we'll need a diode. Check. What next? Anybody compiled the USB drivers yet? (drink!)

This one is already in the N900 kernel, according to dmesg dump:
http://beaversource.oregonstate.edu/..._host.c?rev=34

I'm more interested in these (especially the ehci and ohci ones) since someone was suggesting to me that we should try the same methods that were used on the 770 to get USB host working.

What is the primary obstacle here? Soldering skills? Ha! Check this out... (The large black rectangle on the bottom right corner is a SIM card holder. The red wire is extremely thin. Soldered without microscope or any other type of magnification.)

EDIT: This is not an N900, but another phone from a couple of years back, just as an example.

Well, you'd have to unload the musb ones, etc. etc. I'm more inclined to think they meant "same hardware mods/circuitry as on 770" more than same software.

ITU approves MicroUSB for universal phone charger standard. So a successor of Nokia N900 would also contain MicroUSB for this purpose (and possibly lack the 2mm Nokia charger). USBv3 allows higher mA for charging but I don't know exactly, and it isn't rolled out yet anyway.

Sorry to bring bad news, but it looks as though everyone is resigned to it already, judging by the lack of recent activity on this thread.

Nokia has published a flasher tool for Diablo and Fremantle (N900), as announced here: http://maemo.org/news/announcements/...ablo_released/ .

Previous versions of the flasher tool included the options --enable-usb-host-mode and --disable-usb-host-mode. This version does not. I downloaded the package and read the Help.txt . The USB host options are not available for flasher-3.5 . This strongly suggests that a software method of enabling host mode is currently beyond the capability of Maemo engineers. That puts it beyond the capability of the rest of us too, I think.

There is just one grain of hope. Has anyone out there used R&D mode on the earlier tablets? I have never used it myself and do not care to try. There is something in the old wikis about using R&D mode as a way of entering host mode. Those references are obscure and ambiguous. They appear to say that host mode is automatically active when you are in R&D mode. On the other hand, they might just mean that you can use R&D mode to gain root, after which the "echo host" command would enable host mode on the earlier tablets.

My suspicion is that R&D mode does NOT include USB host mode on the N900. However, anyone willing to try can download flasher-3.5 from http://tablets-dev.nokia.com/maemo-d...-downloads.php and run it with the --enable-rd-mode option.

You will also need a power/data Y-cable to power the transceiver and a mini-to-micro adaptor, since the Y-cables usually come with a mini plug for a HDD enclosure.

I think it's fairer to say that they haven't been commissioned to do it, not that it's "beyond their capability".