Portable harddrive connencted to smartphone?

[Guest Mechanicaldan]

I'm new to the forum, and smartphones in general, but is it possible to connect a portable harddrive to the mini USB port on a smartphone? I've got an Audiovox SMT5600.

Maybe this has been discussed before?

It's just interesting that a 40 GB portable HD costs about the same as a 1 GB mini SD card...roughly the same...

[Guest Matt Kirby]

AFAIK it can't be done - USB needs one of the devices to act as a host, and the Smartphone can't do that.

However I do vaguely remember hearing about a thing that would connect two USB slave devices to allow data transfer between them. From what I remember it was quite limited, I think that it did something like "copy all data from device A to device B" (from camara to HD for example) and not much else.

[Guest sethk]

I'm new to the forum, and smartphones in general, but is it possible to connect a portable harddrive to the mini USB port on a smartphone?  I've got an Audiovox SMT5600.

Maybe this has been discussed before?

It's just interesting that a 40 GB portable HD costs about the same as a 1 GB mini SD card...roughly the same...

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

Theoretically, its possible to have is a Portable Media Player such as an iPod with a media card reader/writer that will net you transfer files to the miniSD card you can then put back in your smartphone, or something along those lines - maybe. Not sure if this is possible with the iPod.

Some of the PMPs now have USB on the go support which allows them to directly transfer files to *some* supported USB slave devices, I'm pretty sure the smartphone platform is not yet on that list, but they keep adding devices (e.g. Cowon X5, iAudio I2)