DroidForums.net | Android Forum & News
This is a sample guest message. Register a free account today to become a member! Once signed in, you'll be able to participate on this site by adding your own topics and posts, as well as connect with other members through your own private inbox!
Connecting to a thumbdrive?
- Thread starter y6y6y6
- Start date
Are you meaning just plug in a flash drive to your phone?
If so, it dosent work like that.
Right. Plug it into the Droid. I was able to do this with my Treo. Any idea why it wouldn't work with the Droid?
Y...You...you're doing it wrong.
I find it hard to believe you actually plugged it into your droid. Now don't get me wrong, if you did, you are AWESOME. But in order to do so, you would have to get a micro usb to full usb adapter then plug the flash drive into the other end, and then connect it to the droid, which would now look more like FrankenDroid.
But maybe you did.. adapters are lying around these days.
As the above poster mentioned, it doesn't work this way. The Android OS (on the droid anyways) is not designed to mount flash drives.. maybe with a hack, but not now. It actually works the other way around.. by plugging your Droid into a PC (or mac) Android allows you to use your built in 16 gig sd card as a mountable volume.. just as your flash drive works when you plug it into your computer.
I assume you want to do this to add files to your droid? I would suggest the much easier plan of connecting it to your computer, pulling down the notification bar to mount it as a drive, and dragging the files over. That ot just pop the battery out, take out the microsd card and put it in an adapter in your computers card reader to transfer files.
Either way is going to be MUCH easier. good luck!
Well, I did. My old Treo would work as a USB host port, I was just wondering why the Droid wouldn't.
I did a bit more research and more detail can be found here -
Issue 738 - android - I hope Android will implement and support the USB host feature - Project Hosting on Google Code
Short version - People have been clamoring for a long time to have Android devices work as a USB port host, and indications are that the hardware would support it. But Neither Google or the hardware manufacturers seem to be playing ball. This is, in my opinion, tragic. And I don't think I'm exaggerating at all (looking right at you Motorola) when i say tragic. Just look through that thread and you'll see the vast potential. The stuff my Treo could do with this was pretty amazing.
Really........
So when I'm out in the woods taking photos with my DSR, and I want to upload a few to the web, you think that's worthless? I ended up doing that almost daily with my Treo.
And yes, of course you can plug it into a Netbook. But one of the ideas behind the Droid is that it *is* your netbook solution, just scaled down. I shouldn't have to carry another piece of hardware just to plug in a card reader. Especially when the Droid is so close to doing this out of the box from a hardware standpoint.
Assuming drivers would be written, things that you'd be able to connect to your Droid if it could act as a USB host -
keyboard
external harddrives
flash drives
printers
scanners
monitors
web cams
USB hubs
cameras
Arduino devices
headphones
music players
serial adapters
projectors
etc.....
So yes, I'm calling it tragic and I'll stand by that. The cool thing about the Droid is that I have a scaled down netbook that fits in my pocket. Adding USB on-the-go would be wildly better than forcing me to carry around *another* netbook just to get this functionality.
I'm actually with y6y6y6 on this one now. He knows a lot more about it than I thought he did, so I retract my original reply, I too think there would be really cool options if this were possible. As far as it being "tragic" well that's to each their own
This is a phone, NOT a netbook. Adding drivers and support for all those devices has a very good potential of making the device utterly unstable and unsupportable. As a result, you would end up with a Windows Mobile phone that does not appeal to the non-technical mass audience.
We may be technical, but we desperately want this phone to success not with us, but with the average Joe, because they spend money on apps and that brings developers to the platform and that makes the platform thrive, not just succeed.
And before anyone jumps down my throat, I am not saying Android should be an iPhone and be completely closed, but there has to be some limits. For those that don't want to be limited, you can just root your phone.
i got my droid on friday the 6th and didn't TOUCH my netbook until the following monday, and only because i was in a verizon dead zone at a friend's house with no wifi.
netbook replacement? maybe not entirely, but mostly..
Y6y6y6 is right, being able to attach any device to the droid would be awesome. Even now I'm totally planning to travel without a laptop and just use the Droid, but the biggest issue is that I can't attach anything extra to it...just another microSD would be nice. Maybe scanners and monitors are little extreme, but for us Droid-as-netbook people implementing this concept would be fantastic.
All I want to do is be able to directly backup photos from my cameras onto it. Of course I could take the battery out and swap microSDs and so on, but that's a huge pain...I'm still looking for possible solutions.
(Posted from my Droid - besides this issue who needs a netbook?)
All I want to do is be able to directly backup photos from my cameras onto it. Of course I could take the battery out and swap microSDs and so on, but that's a huge pain...I'm still looking for possible solutions.
(Posted from my Droid - besides this issue who needs a netbook?)