I spent 3.5 hours at the mechanic on Saturday. I had the tablet on the whole time.

30 minutes of marbles/parking game, 90 minutes of internet browsing, and 90 minutes of the Family Guy movie.

No crashes. No "low memory" errors. The only bottleneck was my pathetic GPRS bandwidth.

Laptop replacement for idle amusement?
Absolutely.

p.s. - Anyone want to lend me a couple hundred bucks for the work my Nissan needs? Oh well - didn't hurt to ask!

I can relate - I have Cingular MediaNet Unlimited, and starting a few months ago, they began to throttle the bandwidth, because I used to get 144K or so. Greedy b@stards!

Oh, and if you complain about it, they will say, "Well, are you tethering a PC to the phone?" A: Uh, no. R: "Well, it is only slow if you are doing that."

Which is a lie! Even MediaNet, via the phone is slow, at 4K or whatever I am getting with that. You know the game - they want you and I to upgrade to Edge and pay $40/month.

i dont think they are throttling it, i think its running out.

I just got my Nokia, and put in the 512MB card. Will a movie compress down to fit on that, since you said you watched the Family Guy. What did you do?

I too have a 512M card. The step-by-step is a b*tch: 1: Rip the CD to a video file using your favorite app. (that part was the tough one.) Then I used the media converter to re-size/re-compress the movie down to size. Since it's not a heavy action film with a lot of detail, it looked fine but I still saw some compression artifacts from time to time.

@ desktop

*cough* P2P *cough*

MISTER CANE! I am ashamed of you!

It's really easy actually. There is commercial software for less than $20 (do a search here and you will find the name) that will convert any DVD to 770 viewable in about 30 minutes or so. Depending on what resolution you choose the size can range from less than 200 MB (perfectly watchable) to about 500 MB (DVD quality).

I have 2 1GB cards that I have used a lot on airplanes (just got back from Maui) and watched several hours of video with lots of battery life left.

The new version of media converter posted a few days ago is wonderful!
All that talk about not being able to handle 30frames per second was hooey.
MUCH smoother running videos now.

I converted a 97 minute dvd to 4 VOB files with DVD Decrypter (freeware) in about 15 minutes, and opened them with media converter. Used the default 2 pass HQ mode, and ended up with four video files for the rs-mmc card in about an hour. Both step were done unattended, so the time is unimportant. The files were 67, 67, 67, and 25 Mb for a total of around 200mb.
You should be able to get two or three DVD's on a 512Mb card at that rate.

@ desktop:

Nuts. There's plenty of LEGAL stuff on P2P too. Go search for podcast, for one thing.

-- edited to add:

Those VOB conversions using Media Converter, what's your desktop's CPU speed?