Just to give you an idea of what I did today on my n800.

Browsed the web for a while in the morning. Charged it up and then went to the park. On the way to the park i listened to music. In the park I did some writing, watched about 1.25 hr of video, and browsed the web a little more. Listened to music on the walk back, and when I got home I had around 60% battery left. It fits my needs almost perfectly. If it had a little more powerful CPU then I think I could sell my home computer and still be perfectly happy.

OK, I was trying to be software-agnostic, but your tablet-encode seems to be (I've never used it) a very viable way to transcode video for the tablet.

Personally, I'm a control freak, and I like to be able to tweak the parameters myself to get just the right config. That's why I use VirtualDub in Windows and AVIDemux in Linux.

Are the settings used in each profile listed somewhere (other than in the download itself)? I couldn't find them in a casual search of your website and maemo.org download page.

Hmm, looks like I can just look at the source code and see the various settings:

The thing that puzzles me about your post after looking at the source is that the default preset is "average", which is only 320x240, at ~350kbps, when I was suggesting something in the neighbourhood of "best". Your suggested command line would use the default "average" preset, no? D'oh! BDIFD! (Boy Do I Feel Dumb)

His suggest command was
mplayer => { abitrate => 192, vbitrate => 1200, width => 400, height => 240 }



Also, does anyone happen to know anywhere in Canada currently selling the N800? I've been able to find a few places with the N810, but no luck with the N800 thus far.

lerker: Good eye! I missed that entirely.

But that bitrate combination is awfully agressive; I would expect some stuttering.

As for N800s in Canada:

I bought both of my N800s from American sources, but a friend of mine found one recently in his local Edmonton craigslist listings.

:-)

Has worked well in all the tests I've done - and if you're going from an upstream DivX source, it will adjust the bitrate per pixel to not have a bitrate (much) higher than the source material.

Some users even want to push it up higher. Additional presets can be defined in ~/.tablet-encode.conf. A human readable list of presets can be got by doing tablet-encode -p list.

For example, I now use tablet-encode as my general DVD ripping/transcoding utility, so I get:

If you get the N810, there is a forum member that has made an adapter so that full size sd cards can be used.

I use my N800 mostly as a media player. I have a 16GB SDHC card in the internal slot and a 32GB SDHC card in the removable slot. I'm using Canola to play music. To play YouTube or other videos, you'll probably want something else because Canola can stutter when playing a video. I've streamed videos to it using mediaserver, from the guy who made tablet-encode. I forget how I watched. In the web browser, maybe.

You might experience a bit of a delay in being able to play music if you like to swap SD cards in and out. The N800 likes to grovel through the SD card whenever you do that.

There's only one thing I'd change on the N800. It needs a screen I can read in bright daylight. Even if I turn the brightness all the way up, it's just about useless on a sunny day. If you're using it as the primary music source in your convertible on a top-down day, you'd better let your passenger choose the music.

I also use mine for navigation with Maemo Mapper. See above about the screen.

As happy as I am with mine, if I could stand having just a few GB of music with me instead of most of my collection, I'd have bought an N810 instead. It seems like a pretty good walking-around device that supports most of the things you'd want in a very portable computer: music, navigation, IM, e-mail, www.

Have you tried using the advanced-backlight applet, I could be wrong but I think it allows you to max out the brightness even higher than the standard controls. While this does not allow you to see it in direct sunlight it does, with some shading, make the screen readable.

@D'ohboy: hanks for the suggestion. Yes, I have the advanced backlight applet and I like it. It helps but not enough on a sunny day. Even with the brightness turned all the way up, it's hard to see the screen on my N800 with the top down.

If this is a big deal for you, the N810's "transflective" screen makes for much better visibility in sunlight.