Only through the adapter. USB doesn't provide enough current to run the disk and the screen and the charger simultaneously; the charger provides four times the USB current. (I did suggest at one point at least trickle-charging the battery over USB, but the limited situations in which it'd be useful didn't justify the extra hardware and software work.)
That and charger chips which did all the fun work of splitting the USB supply into system load current and charger current didn't exist when the Karma was made...
There were a lot of things I did differently on the Karma's successors, but the way the cookie crumbled involved none of them ever getting to market
The Karma was still a great product though, I dug it out a month or so back, put a new battery in there and was impressing everyone at work with how damn responsive that thing was!
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