Is there a whole lot of meaningful difference?

I suspect both are equally buggy and both are basically Alpha versions with lots of kinks to work out. Would you agree?

I have a 770 and I've played with an n800 at compusa. I can confirm the relative bugginess on both. But if you wanna surf the web, the n800 is the way to go. The browser is 2 or 3x as fast rendering a page, which turns a few seconds of waiting into maybe less than one second, which is significant. Anyway, it's not much more expensive for an n800 (comparing prices on new devices at least), right?

770=alpha
N800=beta

With the sites I usually browse N800 is a totally different story than 770. 770 used to crash quite frequently, but with the N800 I really can browse for long periods of time without needing to worry.

Of course if you use javascript/flash-heavy sites your mileage may vary.

I bought a 770 second hand and am very happy with it indeed! If you can get one at a good price I don't see you having any problems with it, I browse with it a lot and visit all my 'Web 2.0' sites like Flickr and myspace without a problem. (notto mention Gmail, IMDB, Wikipedia etc). The only thing I wish it had was better Flash support, so if you want to visit youtube (although very badly) You should decide wether it's worth spending the extra bucks for a N800.

Having said that, you can use sites like vidconvert to convert youtube videos and stream them to your 770, or if you have an 'always on' PC you can use ORB to convert the videos and stream them to your 770 whereevr you are on the fly... The quality is not as great, but certainly watchable and ease of use is certainly comparible to normal. (once you have it set up, and there are some good 'how tos' for that) Doesn't work with all those dodgy 'tv links' sites yet, but that's illegal anyways

I have to say that I haven't really noticed so much bugginess with my 770 either... it's a joy to use and browsing Forums, news sites and all the rest is a breeze!

If you're worried about obsolescence or having the 'new thing' then go for n800 I guess... If you want something cheap and useable and pretty cool and fun, then I'd say grab a 770 off ebay.

My N800 arrived three weeks ago and I'm very surprised that I have not experienced a single OS crash so far.

Funny. At one time common lore had it that it always took three tries for Microsoft to get anything right (eg Windows :-). Do you mean that Nokia follows suit and the N900 will be the first actual "production" device ?...

If you're already convinced you have the answers, why bother trolling with a question?

Thanks for the nice welcome for the newbie.

I only know a little about these things... I've read what I can on web sites, but there's no substitute for you guys - the people who are enthusiasts and uses these things every day.

And I'm already learning things (like the increased browsing speed) that I didn't know about.

I'm not trolling. I genuinely value forum members' perspective on this. Even yours.

Well what device doesn't have some bugs. I can say I have no problems surfing the web on the 770 and I would easily consider myself a fairly heavy user. Although youtube and similar sites I don't really bother with. My suggestion is that you buy the N800 for one major major major problem with that 770 and that being the high possibility of getting the White Screen of Death (wsod). It seems very late production models and earlier production models don't have this problem, but a very large batch produced in the middle of the 770's run does and once it happens you have to send the unit back to Nokia for repair which from the looks of other post here is pretty much a journey into living hell. For example I bought 2 units in early December and both died with wsod within 2 weeks.

My 3rd 770 unit that I bought in the last week of December has been rock solid (knock on wood, find 4 leaf clover, rub lucky rabbits foot) to this point.

To this point the N800 has not had the wsod and I suspect that by now we would have heard if it did, so I'm guessing Nokia made damn sure that the N800 didn't suffer from this problem.