After I downloaded the Treo 700p simulator yesterday, I had a look at it and at the ROM contents. There are some interesting files, but the most interesting – I think – are:
- UsbHostAoe
- UsbHostCdc
- UsbHostHcd
- UsbHostHub
- UsbHostUsbd
The first question you probably ask yourself now is: Does the Treo 700p have USB host capabilities? That means, does it support USB devices like printers, cameras, memory sticks, card readers … ? The file names could mean this… On the other hand: The Treo 700p would be the first Palm device with USB host, and nobody talked about that before the Treo 700p was published. We have to wait until some people have the Treo 700p and can talk about it.
So what do you think? Or – better – what do you know 
?
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I did a little checking. From what I can tell, there is no USB host support for the external USB port on the Treo 700p; those driver are used on an internal port that connects the PXA270 to the radio module and USB is used to handle both radio control and data transfer.
Hi Ben,
thank you fore the insightful post!
To be honest: why doesnt Palm finally support USB Host capabilities? This would allow users to, e.g. access external media or keyboards. A few PocketPC’s can already do this for quite some time…..
Best regards
Tam Hanna
I’d love to know more about the internal achitecture of the 700p. More precisely does the main baseband CPU running Palm OS service the radio stack directly or is there a separate co-processor to do this which the Palm OS communicates with. Benjamin’s post makes me think the latter is true and is what I’ve always suspected in previously devices.
Palm OS Garnet doesn’t support “single core” smartphones, so every Palm OS Garnet device is a two CPU solution. The only smartphone OS currently shipping that supports single core operation is Symbian 8.0, IIRC. However, in my opinion, single core isnt’ that important — it limits what you can do in the user-side of things because you’ve got to be concerned about crashing the radio side, and the cost savings is going away as companies like Qualcomm introduce radio chipsets that include a separate on-chip ARM core for running a host OS.
Thanks for that Benjamin,
That’s what I’ve always thought and known from my past experience working in the area as an EE.
It also rubbishs the point that I have heard on many forums that no 3G ( read UMTS ) devices will be released as Palm OS is unable to service a UMTS stack. In light of what you said then it doesn’t need to.
So will the 700p be a UMTS device if a GSM network version is released.
What do you think??