AY! I'm the one with those kind of conspiracies! Quit muscling in on my cynicism!

Absolutely keeeerect. I'm looking for mine, and I figgured that Nokia would have clued up by now. It's not as if Nokia needs to do special manufacturing runs for replacements. They just need to make sure that the runs are large enough to cover replacement orders. Then, sell the $0.10 part for $10.00.

I'm not generally a gambling man, but I'd wager that Nokia has bunches of these things somewhere. I mean, I'd hate to be the manager who couldn't ship pricey N810's, etc. because I hadn't manufactured enough styli.

I am unhappy.

I just found this on ebay
http://cgi.ebay.com/Nokia-N810-Inter...item27ac2384c4

says more than 10 available. Seller is retroactiveonline. I'd pick some up except I bought a "broken" n810 and now have 4 styluses total set I think I'm set q=
P.S. I think it's funny they call the N810 a phone *rolls eyes* when will people learn.

I'd buy a nice, dark oak stylus for the N810.

Pictures show a stylus made from 1/8 inch teflon rod and a worn-out ballpoint pen. Sorry it's not so cool as a wooden one, and it will not fit the hole in your Tablet. You should find, though, that you can work faster, more accurately and with less fatigue using this than with the short, triangular original. No danger of splinters to damage your screen (or hand), and the teflon should last longer than you do.

With 1/4 inch rod, you could probably pare or file three flat faces to make it fit into your Tablet (at the loss of practical benefits mentioned above). That seems like a lot of fiddly work for doubtful advantage. It might have enough rigidity to use without other support. 1/8 " rod will work without the pen, but flexibility makes it awkward.

The piece of cardboard jams the teflon into the tip of the pen. The teflon flops around without something holding it steady in the radial dimension. Hot-melt glue might make a neater job, but the cardboard works fine. Don't count on glue to anchor a short piece of teflon in the tip. Instead, cut the teflon slightly longer than the pen. The plug at the far end of the pen will keep it from fore-and-aft movement at the light pressures you will be exerting. (You can always glue or fuse the plug in place if it does tend to pop out.)

To find the material, look in your Yellow Pages for "Plastics - Rods, Tubes, Sheets, Etc. - Supply Centres". Call ahead to make sure they have recycled/remanufactured/re-something-that-says-it-isn't-new rod of the size you want. New material is expensive, and there is likely to be a minimum purchase of 10 feet or 3 metres. You might have to convince the suppliers that you have no connection with the food industry. They don't want to end up in newspapers or courts, accused of contributing to contamination of the food supply (a possibility with non-new material).

In North America, rod is made in multiples of 1/8 " diameter. Don't know what metric sizes are available elsewhere - you might be able to fit the rod to the pen without the cardboard spacer.

A sharp knife will cut the rod and fashion a crude tip, and it can then be finished with the usual progressively finer abrasives.

A retractable version is pictured below. This pen holds the teflon more firmly, having a smaller hole in the tip. It had to be drilled out to 9/64 " before the teflon rod would even go through. (The rod's supposed 1/8 " diameter may in fact be a metric size. 3.5mm?)

The spring is stopped relative to the teflon rod by "Magic Wrap" around the rod. You can find this or the equivalent in the Plumbing section of your hardware store. It is holding very well, to my surprise. (1) I did not think anything would hold fast to teflon. (2) The Magic Wrap is supposed to be stretched to three times its original length while it is being wrapped round a pipe: it is hard to do that on a 3.5mm rod. (I may have stretched it about 50%, certainly not 200%.)

I would have used heat-shrink tubing if I had had some in 1/8 " size - one layer of 1/8 " forced on, followed by a layer of 1/4 " heat-shrunk over that. The Magic Wrap is what I happened to have on hand, and it seems to be OK.

Exposure and retraction of the teflon are working perfectly, now that the Magic Wrap has been pushed back so that it doesn't get stuck on the blue* plastic tip of the pen. (That explains why the wrap is bunched up against the spring.)

The firmer hold of the tip is definitely an improvement.

*It looks black in these pictures. Don't know why. It's blue.