OK, I've had my N800 for about two weeks now. Long enough to know her personality is female, but not long enough to give her a name.

From my own experiences and from reading these forums I've come to realize a couple of things. These devices are promoted as INTERNET tablets, and yet the built in netcentric applications, e.g. Opera and email client, really suck. Opera is pretty much useless for any interactive work at all! #&|| I can't even log onto my online banking website much less use any of the online office suites. And the email client fails to start eight out of ten times, and when it does it's lame. Why do I need to use a less than mature web browser like Minimo to do anything useful?

So the rant is this; why hasn't Nokia or someone in the community ported some of the really great open source Linux stuff to the iT? The source is available for office suites like OpenOffice and StarOffice, email clients like Thunderbird, and probably the premier browser on any platform, Firefox. Am I being naive to think at least some of these can't be compiled on the Maemo platform?

I haven't done any programming since the days of the PDP-11, RSTS, and DEC Basic, so I may be completely off base here, but I'd really like to chuck my Windows Mobile PDA, and rely soley on the (hmmmm, I really need to figger out a name for her) N800, but I cannot with the state of the software load as it is.

OK, Rant over.

Much of the high-end open source software like OpenOffice, Thunderbird and Firefox aren't realistic on the constrained hardware of an N800.

Things like Abiword, Gnumeric, Minimo and Sylpheed for word processing, spreadsheets, web browsing and email are portable, however - and have been ported.

Minimo uses the same rendering engine as Firefox, so Firefox probably won't give you much, except excessive reboots due to out-of-memory exceptions.

Cheers,

Andrew