Recently I brought a bunch of hardware extensions for my laptop. First item is a Transcend PCMCIA card, that provides two UBS2.0 ports. My laptop has only two USB1.1 ports and using USB2.0 for the external harddisk would be nice. I also run out free ports (mouse, cardreader, harddisk, webcam, ...). The card worked out of the box. unfortunately USB2.0 or more precisely the ehci-hcd.ko gives problems. Sometimes it works, but most of the time the whole system locks up.
Second item was a Logitec Quickcam. Unfortunately there seems to be only a video4linux driver and none for v4l2. But at least the cam works.
Third is a USB headset, which I use for VoIP. It provides an own soundcard. Now after some experiements (and also patches to gstreamer) I seem to be able to use it in all applications.
Finally I found a way to copy music to my phone (N70). When connecting the phone via USB it unfortunately not appears as a drive. But I can use the RS-MMC card in the N 770 too and this shows the card as a drive under linux.