Eric - I'm pretty much in the same boat as you. Linux newbie who doesn't particularly want to learn, computer savvy. I want a lot of the same functions you want - simple note taking, a little spreadsheet, PIM functions, etc....

I was looking for a replacement PDA and considered the Touch, but had a few problems with it - 1) I hated the keyboard, could not get the hang of it; 2) the browser mashed up my Google Calendar and did some other funky butt things; 3) the calendar feature was simply a reader - I couldn't ENTER events.

Now, I have heavily Web 2.0'ed myself. I use GMail, GCal, some Google Docs and a task manager program called Nozbe. The web experience using the N800 is excellent. I also wanted a backup in case I was not near a hotspot - and for that GPE Calendar works pretty good, especially combined with a program called Erminig - which syncs to GCal. Sync works well. And there is a companion program - GPESummary - which will display a summary of events on the main screen. There are a variety of other GPE programs - a To Do list, Contacts, a Timesheet, etc.

I use Maemopad+ which is a rather nice note program - either keyed in text notes or sketch notes. I recently upgraded to the new OS2008 - which other than the long download time because the server was slammed - was a breeze to "reflash" from my Windows XP machine. I've downloaded some new stuff I haven't been able to try out yet - Wordpy, which is supposed to be a blogging client for WordPress accounts. I don't have WordPress (Blogger following the Google theme), but I'm thinking it's more advanced editing features might work nicely without having to upload to WordPress. Dunno though, I need to try it.

I'm on here today seeing if there is a new port for Gnumeric - which is a really nice spreadsheet program. Used Gnumeric on the old OS, but haven't been able to get it working on OS2008. It looks like there is a new port, so I'm going to have to try that this evening. But again, I won't have to do a bit of Linux to get it working; I didn't for the old OS and it looks like the guy just put the installer package up in the last day or so.

Canola2 for a media player looks really slick. I don't have a lot of media on the device, but it looks like a similar sort of interface for photos, music, and movies as "coverflow" on the Touch.

There are a couple of good email programs - I use Claws but there is another one about to be released. I use gmail for my main account, but I have a couple of accounts that I want to monitor every once in awhile, and this works great.

So, I really like my N800 with OS2008. I'm not learning Linux for it, and it was a little frustrating right after the new OS came out and repositories were crammed and things not working quite right. But I installed prolly about 8-9 programs the other night in 30 minutes (including download times) - and the experience was on par with installing anything on my old Dell Axim PDA.

The difference is in culture surrounding the device. The N800 uses the Linux open source ethos to create its software base - so some things download and work really well - basically the basic stuff you really want. Some of it isn't as polished as a commercial product might be - but it's free and it does what it's supposed to do. And chances are, if you have a problem or gripe, you can contact the person who made it.