Iv had an interesting idea while iv been looking for a nas/media player/torrent system. Baisically Im aiming to connect the device to a usb hub as master so i can have a printer, usb hard drive and usb dvdrw drive connected.

Then i hope to use samba and cups to share the usb peripherals to the network so anyone can print, read/burn dvds or use the hdd as a nas. But also add torrent files to a shared point which transmission could parse and begin downloading to the hdd as appropriate. Then idealy also add a usb to vga to get some devent size display, but thats less important.

Iv noticed the flaw with the usb vga idea of low fps and print support may be very early in development but the rest, well, anyone able to help by letting me know what mu chances are before i begin spending? thanks

Holy crap. Your post made me realize that, theoretically, these things could be useful as mini servers (I had been kinda blowing that off). Now that you mention it, I have a spare N800 I'd love to rig up like that...

Interesting idea guys, personally I use mini-boxes like ALIX systems for this kind of application as they're a little more afordable and are a little more targetted for this type of purpose. The tablets are theoretically capable of doing all that you're after, but there's still some software development to be had and quite frankly unless you've got the extra tablet kicking around and don't want to use it as a mobile device anymore it's really not worth the effort (by the time you spend the money on a USB to VGA adapter you're already half way to an ALIX3c3 that includes audio, VGA, 2 USB ports and 2 mini PCIs... all on a 500 mHz X86 based system that you can put any number of various OS's on). My vision of the setup would be to use the tablet as a front end/controller for the media playback and torrent adding/etc through web interfaces; that way the tablet's doing what it does best, and your still get a cheap very neat mini server.

-Rob