I've been looking for a handheld device without phone capabilities for a while now, and haven't found anything appropriate. I used the ipaq110, but found it extremely fragile, and was not impressed with the battery like.

Looking at the n810, my main use for it would be school. I have one year left of highschool, and after that I want to go into compeng. So here are my questions. Does the n810 come with any address book or calendar apps on it? If not, are you able to install other apps on the device, and if so, are they readily available. I assume you would be able to since it's a unix based OS, but I thought I better ask before investing the money.

Thanks for advice in advance.

absolutely, you can install all sorts of software on it. take a look around the forums!

I use the default Address book app, and I installed GPE Calendar + Erminig to Two-way sync it with my Google Calendars. Plus theres lots of other programs that you can download that would be useful for school. Also check out http://maemo.org/downloads/OS2008/ to see a wide selection of some available apps.

If you are getting the N8x0 as a PDA you will probably be disappointed. The address book applications is anemic at bast and the calendaring solutions have been hit and miss.

Not that people haven't gotten it to work as a PDA, or that you or someone tomorrow can't write your own solution, but for now it's not really a PDA.

Well, I'm not necessarily looking for a pda, but a device with the features I want, which the 810 seems to fit. If that happens to be classified as an internet tablet then that's ok too. I had a palm T since grade 6 which did me fine for all my pda needs, but lacked nicer abilities like wifi, and decent video play back.

Also, as far as durability goes....Anyone had their 810 survive any falls? My old palm survived the worst abuse a pda has ever seen, but my ipaq broke after a very small drop (thankfully I was still able to return it).

I've owned many Palm products (Palm PilotPro, IIIc, T|e) and they had a superior PDA experience ( by an order of magnitude ) over the n8x0's. Video playback is not the strong suit of the N8x0's either. Resolution, bitrate, and codec support is limited due to the lack of bus bandwidth and non-accelerated drawing.

For another view, I have owned 6 palms over the last several years, and used them daily. I am able to do everything I did on my palms on my n810, and a thousand more things as well. If you are going into compsci/compeng then it is probably a good choice. My sophomore son is compsci in high school and just bought one for himself; loves it. The GPE suite plus Erminig combo works very well for me, and, as we have all learned about any technology, they all have quirks.

Extremely happy to have left the increasingly rapid-failure hardware world of Palm,
Oberon85

on a side note, my wife is still using my T3, and loves it!

You can get a pretty good summary of what the N810 (or N800) can do by checking out the Wiki at the top of the main page here.

As to the point of duarbility... so far mine has tumbled to the ground (concrete and industrial carpeting) a ton of times both in the case and out and so far it is fine.

If it were to fall onto a hard corner directly onto its screen, like most other devices, it would surely get hurt, but the average falls for me have been fine.

Typically mine falls out of my pocket (cell pocket in a pair of Dickies) quite often. But it has been great (like all my Nokia phones before me).

I wouldn't recommend trying it on purpose, but as long as the fall isn't massive, it should be fine.

I've actually had a wonderful video experience with the tablets (video encoded with Handbrake and played via Canola).

-T.