The N800 gets -very- good with the latest software and a few freely available downloads such as the brilliant n800 media converter. I use mine every day on the subway watching recorded TV-shows and listening to music and for longer trips, a movie or two is a real treat. At first I was a bit irritated that I had to re-encode everything for it to play nice with the n800, but you get into the habit of doing that real quick. If you don't want to transcode, then of course it's not very good at all. I had some limited success using ORB to transcode on the fly, but the picture quality really suffered.

Picture quality with reencoded material is excellent, sound quality perfectly adequate with good pair of headphones, and the built-in speakers are good enough that I've watched the occasional episode of House even without headphones.

The only issue I have is the battery-time, I have to be pretty careful to charge it at least once a day, sometimes twice.