I've beaten the holy hell out of mine, and it's still alive and ticking. It's been dropped from waist-high onto a wide variety of hard/abrasive surfaces, twice hard enough to pop the faceplate off. I've got a bad case of the dropsies. It has a few knicks on the corners; purely cosmetic damage. It's a generally robust device, IMO, although not unbreakable.

Thanks for the reply. I was asking if there was a known fault with the N800, not anything about flashing, which I hadn't done. The device was not responding at all to any method detailed in the various posts on the troubleshooting forum, so I thought it was dead. No lights, no LCD lighting up in any way. It looked absolutely and completely dead.

My purpose for posting was to find out if the N800 was very prone to dud units, and hopefully to get lots of positive posts from people who have been using their N800 for a long time without incident.

After reading your post, I made what I thought was yet another futile attempt to turn it on, and after having the battery out for the whole night, it booted up! It's now sitting on my shredder charging, and I'll give it a good few hours before I try to do anything with it. I can't even guess why this worked, but I'm not complaining. At least I don't have to go through the embarrassment of sending it back only to be told it's working perfectly. Perhaps it should be renamed Phoenix.

Happy user going off to read up everything I can find on shutdown problems so I can hopefully avoid the problem again.

You'd better send it back. These n800's aren't dainty flowers. I dropped mine from about 4 feet onto my asphalt driveway. I thought for sure it was going to be dead. Nothing but a dinged corner and a scratched bezel. That happened right after I got it nearly 10 months ago.

I keep my N800 in my shirt pocket and have it fall out in the same way. Thus far, it has not been dented, scratched, or chipped by the abuse.

Actually, the worst that's happened is that I once had it fall out of my pocket when I leaned over to hug my two year old. My N800 clunked her on the head pretty good. No damage to the N800 though.

My only complaint is the screen. After 1.5 months, mine has fine hairline scratches and a few "bubbles," and even a minor gouge. This is after using only Nokia's stylus or my fingers. After a year of living in my pocket, my Treo 700P's screen is pristine!

Get a screen protector!!!

Thank goodness your N800 wasn't damaged. I understand that children have softer skulls than adults, so I guess you were lucky.

My friend dropped his N800 in the driveway 3 times already and it still works. I haven't dropped mine yet! lol