·Can the Rio Car connect to other USB devices such as portable USB hard drives? (Entry last updated on December 26th, 2004)
The Rio Car only has a USB "slave" port. It does not have a USB "master" port, so it cannot act as a host to other slave devices.
This precludes many things. The following things cannot be done with the car player's USB port:
Attach a portable USB hard drive for offline storage.
Attach a portable USB CD, CD-R, or DVD drive.
Attach a portable MP3 player and send tunes to it.
Attach a USB-ethernet converter.
Attach a USB-based wireless 802.11b adapter.
Attach a digital camera for storing its pictures on the car player's hard disk.
Connect two car players directly to each other for sharing tunes.
The only USB ports it can be connected to are those on PC computers with the proper driver software. At the current time, that is only Windows PCs running the Emplode software.
Finally, keep in mind that the player has a fully-functional 10baseT ethernet port, and there's a lot more useful stuff you can do with ethernet.