Looks like our favorite Android Tablet, the Motorola Xoom has got a new feature. You can read out review on the Xoom here. As usual the great developers over at XDA have got another trick up their sleeves. Developer Roebeet has hacked the Xoom to allow USB Hosting.

Roebeet is well known at XDA in the tablet area’s. He worked hard on the Augen Gentouch, and also on the G-Tablet by Viewsonic. The first three roms I flashed to my G-Tab were all by him. You will need to Root your Xoom for this little hack, but it will be well worth it.

I’ll send you to Roebeet’s instructions because it is a pretty involved procedure. If you are not comfortable messing with your brand new, shiny and expensive Xoom, you might want to pass on this. Adding USB Host feature will allow you to plug in USB drives for music and media, additional storage, wired keyboards, and many other things so this is a good feature to have. As always, do these changes at your own risk. Instructions can be found in this post.

[via XDA Forums]

10 COMMENTS

  1. It is on days like today that I love my Xoom that much more. I feel sorry for the people that have returned their Xooms with out giving Google or the Dev Community a real chance at showing just how amazing this tablet is going to be….

  2. The iPad had this a looooooooong time ago. The only catch is that you have to buy apple’s camera connector kit. oh… and it automounts too :))

  3. The iPad had this a looooooooong time ago. The only catch is that you have to buy apple’s camera connector kit. oh… and it automounts too :))

  4. this only works if the device consume little power, you can forget about attaching a portable hard drive on it….i am thinking about getting the acer iconia a500, it actually has a full usb port

  5. I use this USB host cable
    and it works great. Have tested it with my 750gb Oyen and 320gb WD
    Passport external HDD’s, several usb flash drives (8-16gb), San disk USB
    memory card reader, and a USB keyboard.

    For those having issues getting their Xoom to recognize USB storage
    devices here’s what I’ve got and did to get it to work: I flashed my
    XOOM (3.1) to the 2.6.36.4 Tiamat_Xoom-v1.4.4-Full_Throttle Kernel and
    was unable to get the USBMount to recognize drives or storage at first.
    I installed USB Mass Storage Watcher
    from the market (it’s free) and it works awesome! Can mount any
    storage I want (NTFS, FAT16/32, HFS, HFS+, EXT2, ETX3, EXT4) with any
    capacity. I think this app will work with any rooted (and possibly unrooted) Xoom (or other
    devices). Under my Kernel my USB host is located under/usbOTG.

    Hope this helps.

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