Originally Posted by inq44

You are right, of course, but the diamond and the TP are not that different... I just hope hardware wise everything is in place, and I believe we should start with that assumption; the manual is pretty clear about this. If they were only supporting flashing from external sd-card reader, they would have just said so. At least that's what "usb 2.0 host suport thru dongle" means to me... Then again maybe the "dongle" is something special, more than just rearranged pins and externally supplied power...

i agree with you but i bought a mini usb y cable and tried it out but it did not work. I realize that it could just be me but i can confirm that power was getting to the usb drive so not sure why it did not work for me

This is the official response I got from HTC, after asking about usb host capabilities on the TP:

"The Touch Pro does not support USB host mode. There might be some third party applications that activates that functionality, however HTC is not supporting it nor does HTC stand responsible for any use of third party applications."

This is really interesting; I was expecting more of an "USB host not supported. Period." Instead they hint that "third party applications" could solve the problem; this seems to confirm what I suspected: that the device is most likely only missing the proper driver. Again, since the class drivers (mass storage, HID, etc.) seem to be present (some drivers I installed myself, just to be sure) it's most likely that the low-level host controller driver is missing. Exactly which driver that is (chipset wise) I can't tell, and with this kind of devices it usually isn't free/publicly availablea and, from what I read, notoriously difficult to reverse engineer... I just hope I'm wrong and this can be fixed by building the correct cable...

I am not in the mood to read the entire thread, but has anyone mentioned this site?
http://www.teksoftco.com/index.php?s...roducts&pid=18
Their software claims to let you plug a usb mouse or keyboard right into the usb port on the phone.

I hope the G1/Android people will have more luck with this... They practically share the hardware and have the advantage of actually having kernel source code to look at; if they succeed in writing a driver, it will probably be possible to port it over to WM. Here are two links worth looking at which I believe relevant to this discussion:

http://android-dls.com/wiki/index.php?title=G1_USB_Host
and
http://www.telesphoreo.org/pipermail...ry/000282.html

While these help sorting out the hardware debate, they don't (yet) provide any solutions...

hi all
i think we need 5 voltage power supply for support.
because when i run usb host driver,i can check 1v voltage in raphael usb port
and in the htc diamond manual usb picture,you can see a power wire...
every body can help for schematic usb host cable for htc raphael? in our country we can't buy this cable from shopping sites...!
sorry for bad english...

alright from the looks of things the only thing we're missing is a driver. i wish i had of learned about usb drivers a long time ago so i wouldn't be starting from scratch here but i'm sure somebody else knows more about usb host drivers than i do. i know writing device drivers are not easy... but CAN be done. a few people who know about drivers (on a programming level) and a few programmers need to get together and make one i'm sure it can be made in a fairly short amount of time.

hell i'd be willing to buy the driver... i'm sure quite a few other people would assuming it was functional without many bugs and a cable maybe sold aswell. the capabilities to plug a phone into any usb device and use it's capabilities can be quite powerful... for example DVR receivers u can plug into ur computer and copy videos off... could be done with ur phone.

somebody that knows something about programming drivers please contact me at

sajrohan at gmail dot com

Yeah, I'd be willing to pay for a driver as well, but I think the main hurdle here is the missing hardware documentation; it that was available, then I'm sure both the Android people and the devs here would give it a shot. I wonder if it wouldn't be possible to buy a license/whatever from Qualcomm for it...

hey everyone i found this http://forum.ppcwarez.org/viewtopic.php?f=51&t=58813 cant this help us with the usb host for the diamond

Originally Posted by mishooo

hey everyone i found this http://forumxxxxxx cant this help us with the usb host for the diamond

Those are drivers for devices with a "offical" (implented in the the OS) usb-host connection. So I guess they will do nothing,...

AFAIK the problems are:
HTC and other phone devices are in general USB slaves, not masters by default.
The drivers / software from the ppcxyz link above will allow you to make any HTC Qualcom based phone to USB master and you may attach any slave device as long as it is powered externally (not through the phone).
All credits go to the original developer!