Michael Wood

I bought a new N800 for a bargain £130, I’ve been really pleased with it, especially after upgrading it to OS2008 which is pretty nice. One thing that I wanted to do was use it as a jukebox/media player for my room when I don’t have my PC on. SDHC hasn’t quite reached 32GB+ that my music collection is so that meant I had to make sure that the music i wanted to listen to was already on the N800 before I shut down my PC… ..Until now, I found an article on internettablettalk that tells you how to turn on USB host mode, having done that all you then need a connection cable.

Having no suitable cable around and not wanting to order an adapter I found two USB female to male usb cables which came with some USB sticks (basically small usb extension wires) . Once you have a Female to Female cable you can use the Male USB mini-A cable to Male USB A that came with your N800 to connect that up to your N800’s mini USB B female socket.

So basically you’ll have this: N800 Female mini A socket -> Nokia cable Male mini USB AÂ to USB A -> Female USB A to Female USB A -> your prepherial

1)Â Excellently soldered even though I say so myself
2) Insulating the individual wires can be tricky.

3)Â

4) Read these instructions or go straight ahead and install usbcontrol

cheat: as root: echo host> /sys/devices/platform/musb_hdrc/mode

5)Â

None of this info is particularly new, it’s just not that widely known and is pretty useful. That’s the beauty of having a device that is based on Open Source software, I’m constantly finding cool things like this. The things this device can do is continually expanding.

One thing to note is that the file browser gets very slow when browsing more than around 100 files or folders, so I drop back to the terminal+mplayer for browsing and playing content, hopefully the file browser will be made more efficient soon.