Motorola Milestone (Droid) USB host mode

You may have seen our Motorola Milestone review a little while, if so you’ll know that we were pretty impressed with the handset, certainly the best QWERTY keyboarded Android device out there at the moment in our opinion.

So how would you like to enable USB-Host mode on your Motorola Milestone (aka Motorola Droid)? Having a hunt around the web a few days ago I discovered that a clever chap, Chris Paget, has come up with a way to use USB storage devices on the Milestone. It’s a bit of a hack, you’ll have to make your own USB cable and ‘dongle’ in order to do it but if you head over to Chris’s website you’ll find full instructions on how to do it!

The USB hardware on the Droid is actually capable of USB-OTG (meaning that it can act as both host and peripheral), however it only possesses a standard USB Micro-B port instead of the Micro-AB port that you would normally get from an OTG device (such as the N810). With a minimal amount of effort (and tolerance of a few bugs) it’s possible to enable the B port as a host interface (as OTG says you should be able to do), meaning it supplies power and acts as the bus controller. It’s actually pretty easy; I can easily think of about a hundred million ways to make this useful on the Droid (think: plug any USB hardware you like into your Droid, as long as it works in Linux it should work in Android).

Posted by: Matt