thanks, BruceL, this is more like what i was wondering about. if i could reasonably browse and e-mail while listening to music, anything else would be gravy.

of course on the applications side, everything needs MidnightCommander

buy a n800 and start porting cool stuff to it

this is just a follow-up to the gracious advice given here:

i purchased my N800 when the price hit $179USD at Buy. i've had it for about three days and so far it has very pleasingly met my expectations based on readings in the ITT forums. i'm having lots of fun with it.

i'm using mine straight outta the box (OS2007) with the exception of Leafpad editor. i tried to use the Nano editor, but some library i couldn't find was needed. i was disappointed that the N800 doesn't seem to want to play with Pandora Radio, but everything else is cool, so far. this thing is a useful, fun and highly portable little Linux gadget.

thanks again!

Power management is the big issue and nobody can currently get close to ARM's low power requirements. Cell phones, Crack berries and iPods all use the ARM.

See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Controv...bile_computers

I think that Nokia will have to stick to ARM processors for the tablets at least until Intel releases the 'Moorestown' SoC (System on a Chip) in 2009/2010.

Even then, the ARM folks will have moved on significantly with maybe an order of magnitude performance increase for the same power envelope.

The outsider in this race is the AMD Geode - used in the OLPC project - but AMD may not have their heart in this race.

One thing is certain: our N800/810s, iPhones/iTouchs and OLPC XOs will all be obsolete within two years - still usable, of course, but I think we will all want the next generation systems by then.

In place of Pandora try vagalume (app name) which works with Last.fm (similar concept to pandora)

Glad to hear you joined the N800 club!

For right now, ARM and the N8xx can't be beat for portability. An Eee or something similar is simply too big and uses too much power. The N8xx's are a much better deal provided you get a portable keyboard and a decent SD card. I consider the N800 a better machine than the N810 simply due to the added storage. IMHO it was a stupid decision by Nokia to use a fixed internal flash, and one that will come back to bite them even with the keyboard and GPS. What they really should have done is kept the two cards and added more RAM.

In the future, however, things will change drastically in the mobile processor world. When the newer x86 fabs come online with smaller feature size the X86 will easily be able to compete with ARM. Manufacturers and developers will flock to them at that point, due to ease of porting/developing apps. For the time being, however, the N8xx is the hot item along with the iPhone/iPod touch. But the N8xx world is Open Source, and will evolve faster if given the freedom and support from Nokia to do so.

Unfortunately there are currently quite a few roadblocks to that, such as crappy servers, no mirrors, an excessive number of third-party repositories, a few difficulties getting source code, non-free code, and reliance upon an obsolete (in the Linux world) code base (Debian repositories). Hopefully some of that will be resolved in the future, although I wouldn't bet on it. . .

But there are also quite a few parallel mobile Linux projects going on. They can all build upon the code bases of each other, and the architecture, be it ARM or x86, is irrelevant. Sooner or later there will be enough devices to warrant a GOOD and manufacturer INDEPENDENT distro. At that point thngs will really get interesting. If we could get a distro with a code base like Ubuntu/Kubutu/Fedora that uses more recent source code and has lots of dedicated users it would really spur development on this type of platform.

Also, contrary to other posts I've seen here and as you have maybe already found out, video works quite well with the proper apps and encoding. The only problem is that Nokia's media player simply sucks. . . but that can be remedied with Mplayer.

I second that. I just bought an iGo keyboard from Amazon for $29.99 and I can't believe how much it enhances the N800 (and my 770).

At this price they are a real steal:
http://www.amazon.com/Stowaway-Ultra...8988961&sr=8-1

great advice! vagalume/last.fm works very well.

i'm using Puppy Linux on my old PC. Puppy installs itself as a RAMDISK each time it boots and runs from RAM. i wonder if someting like that might not be good in the mobile Linux realm, as it's small and runs fast on limited resources.

but, yeah, it would be great to see some mobile distributions.

yup, i can certainly see how that would come in handy. thanks for the info and link.

BTW, my trouble with the Nano text editor was because i hadn't installed the terminal yet. operator error - no fault of N800 or Nano