*I was up in the air as to if I should put this in "general" or "competitors" so if I made the wrong decision, feel free to move this*

So I own a 2nd gen touch but I need to know if the move is right for me. I use my ipod primarily for internet browsing and from what I understand, the n810 should be better (faster) for that. Anything past internet browsing on the touch and you are cutting down to under two hours of battery life, which can truly suck (I've taken to bringing my gba with me on the go now). I've jailbroken my ipod and while that brings some extra functionality, it's still pretty limited. I am tired right now from looking up info on the n810 (I HATE finding new and exciting devices in my price range) so I'll just throw out a list and number questions as they come out

Things I don't like about the ipod touch:
itunes
restricted official 3rd party development
somewhat immature unofficial 3rd party development
official sdk uses objective c and unofficial ones aren't mature
crap battery life when doing things beyond web browsing (great battery life while listening to music, I'll give it that)
no true multitasking (backgrounder can be very unreliable)
non-replaceable battery
non-replaceable memory
thin range of codec support
target of thieves(actually have been mugged over one)

Things that entice me about the n810:
GPS
higher resolution
faster web browsing (?)
Not owned by 1 in 5 people my age
pidgin! (1. do plugins work? Can I get it working with facebook?)
multitasking (2. How much of a hit would I experience say listening to pandora in an internet browser with pidgin while doing some light browsing? How about with just pidgin and pandora?)
Full linux distributions! (3. I read through the thread about the most recent attempts at getting Jaunty working and while someone posted a video of KDE 4 being slow, no mention of a basic Gnome or even xfce. What can I expect?)
Micro SD cards! (with adapter)
Replaceable batteries (4. what can I expect from the masses of 5 dollar batteries on ebay?)
Bluetooth - yes I know 3.0 will allegedly allow 2nd gen touch owners to use it (5. sync-able with a dumb-phone? Can I transfer pictures to a n810 from my phone?)
I can develop for it (6. How hard is it to? I've made some small things for the DS but never took off due to sdk unreliability.)
con - no video output

General Questions
7. How long can I expect to wait for a GPS lock? (This is coming from someone who owns a gps which on a good day finds its position in 10 minutes) I'm still not 100% on how GPS works on the n810, can maps be stored on the device or do I need to be next to a wifi hotspot each time I change my destination? Are turn by turn directions supported (outside of the 130 dollar app)?
8. How matured are emulators for the device? (Save states, 2 player, full speed, etc)
9. Is the community dieing? Will full linux distro support save it? What is the likely hood of n810 users being able to upgrade to n900 software to keep with the community?
10. Wardiving is a no-go, correct? (oh who am I kidding: closed source wifi drivers = no WEP cracking, right?)
10.5 Wifi strength? better/ worse then an ipod touch?
11. Where could I feasibly go to a store to try one out?

Now I feel awful bombarding all of you with these questions, so as an owner of an ipod touch for over half a year I'm sure there are some questions I can answer to help those on the same fence looking the opposite direction; feel free to ask away. edit - (although videos of the ipod touch are much easier to come by)

Also, I've noticed the lack of good comparisons out there (Especially in the video department), if someone wanted to lend me (a total stranger :P - in the US) one, I would happily spend a day or two learning the software so that I can attempt at making a fair comparison video review -I do not work for nokia-.

Edit: Should probably add that this is to fill the niche between pen/paper and my netbook, a pocketable internet browser with a dictionary

Ok...
7(?) The GPS in the N810 varies between sucky and downright useless, and the general consensus is that you are better off with a £20 bluetooth one off amazon or something. I use one with my N800, and it's brilliant. It depends on the mapping program as to storage - maemomapper requires you to either download on the go or download the maps for where you want to be before you get there (they are large as they are based off google maps etc) and you need to download routes, but the built in mapping program downloads full maps and shows you where you are, though you have to have a license for route planning.
8) Emulators? If you mean gameboy etc, I use the gameboy pocket one and it hasn't crashed on me once. Seriously. I thought it did, but it turned out I was mashing the back button by accident when I got to an exciting bit in Mario, which is the quit button. Garnet, the Palm emulator, has some mixed reviews - it's good for some things but not all.
9) Community seems good, but that's not really for me to judge. Chances are high that Fremantle (next Maemo) will run on N800/N810s in some form (both units share the same internals, with the N800 having 2x full size SD slots and the N810 having a keyboard and 1 micro-sd slot. You can quite happily run full distros on it. I run emulated debian on mine (called Turbo-Easy-Debian) and can happily use Openoffice and the Gimp if I have to. Android is also rapidly maturing on the device.
10) Wardriving works after a fashion - you can passively break WEP, but no active injection attacks. You need some linux system familiarity for this one, because it requires the command line. Try looking up Kismet and aircrack-ng.
10.5) Wifi strength is a major plus on my N800 - it's better than my laptop.
11) No idea, UK. You can however download the Maemo SDK (scratchbox) and run it in there on your PC (linux required methinks).

Video support is brilliant once Mplayer in install, playing probably any codec you can think of and then some. I use Knots, which allows me to stream videos to the N800 over my network from a media PC downstairs, and it works brilliantly - I can even watch Blackadder DVD isos.
This thing is effectively a small form-factor netbook without a proper keyboard. A bluetooth or USB keyboard (and a bit of squinting) and it's perfectly usable for 99% of tasks. It's unfair to compare it to the ipod, which is an embedded device designed to do a few tasks and do them well. It's in a different league in terms of functionality.
I would however consider getting an N800 instead of N810. You can use the money saved to get a keyboard and bluetooth GPS (which you'll probably need anyway) and you can expand the storage space to 32GB (2x SD cards).

Hope this helps, I've had mine since christmas and couldn't do without it, was considering a netbook but went for this instead for £100. Haven't wanted a netbook since.
(I have fairly good experience with Iphones/touchs and they are good but only for the limited number of tasks they are designed for. I'm also fairly linux experienced - if you get an N8~ it helps when doing some of the seriously advanced stuff this thing was never designed for (wardriving, running web servers, repeatedly rebooting housemate's Ipod touch via SSH), but is by no means a requirement. It's just there if you want it).

7) GPS works fine in my N810. It takes between 20 and 60 seconds to get a lock while I am driving at 100 km/h. I have A-GPS installed and I think it helps.

7) I second notnarb here, GPS works fine in my N810 these days. Not have those nightmares people describe

Sorry, my bad on the gps! Bit out of date, nice to know its improved!

If price isn't a huge issue (think ~$500 instead of ~$220 for the N810), I'd recommend waiting for the new tablets as both the N810 and the iPod Touch are really out of date at this point.

There is 3rd party GPS available for iPod touch, rendering you similar application as Maemo Mapper. You can also wait for BlueTooth and use 3rd party GPS over BlueTooth. The N8x0 GPS is crap in my experience, but using the one from phone (exported with ExtGPS) works fine. You can wardrive with 3rd party WiFi USB or use your laptop to crack the WEP. Pidgin works on N8x0, Nimbuzz works on iPod touch. You can download (Google) maps and save them on both devices, you can do this live over 3G etc as well.

@allnameswereout
Just curious: have you used your N810 gps with A-GPS (or AGPS) installed?

Yeah, I tried tons of things to fix it including removing certain files from /var and clean firmware. It remains just as **** (long time to get lock, and losing the lock) maybe a little bit better to get lock initially; still takes various minutes if I can get one at all. I think some GPS chips in N810 are just b0rked.

2. multitasking is fine, as long as you don't use too much memory (if you do swapping will stop the device to a crawl)
3. linux distributions: I use easydebian and it works great, only problem is that those distros are not adapted to tiny touchscreens. Mer, on the other hand, is.
4. forget about ultracheap ebay batteries, you'll get what wou pay for. mugen batteries are cheap enough and have been reported to work fine.
5. bluetooth works fine for whatever you want to use it.
6. developing is quite easy if you use python. Of course, you can use almost whatever you want (c, c++, vala...)
7. How long can I expect to wait for a GPS lock? (This is coming from someone who owns a gps which on a good day finds its position in 10 minutes)
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Usually 1-3 min once agps is installed. Some people do not get this results, but I think their device is faulty.
Maps are stored in the device, even with maemo mapper (you have to download them, though)
Turn by turn directions are supported by navit (but you may not find good maps for navit)
That depends on what you want to emulate, the device is not very powerful so you can't emulate fast machines. Those which I've tested worked nicely.
The community is the best thing about these devices.
promiscuous mode works fine, no packet injection. A free driver is in the works, but it is alpha quality and development seems to have stagnated last couple of months.
No idea, don't have an ipod touch.
No idea, try a Nokia store. I bought mine in ebay.
About battery life, it is 7 hours playing music/video. Playing streamed music it is down to 3 hours. Playing streamed video, down to 2 hours.