First, a question: After installing MediaBox, movie files encoded using the Nokia IT Video Converter no longer work properly. They stutter and barely play at all. This happens in MediaBox and Canola2, and thus I suspect has something to do with MPlayer itself (mplayer was installed along with mediabox). Any suggestions? If I uninstall MPlayer, will MediaBox still work?

Second, my thoughts on the players. I'm a newbie N800 owner, but long-time ITT lurker. Since I installed Canola earliest, most of my comments are related to it rather than the other players.

**Canola2**
Likes:
-Photo viewer
I am in love with the photo viewer in Canola2. I showed off photos of my baby niece over the holidays and everyone loved flipping through the photos. The kinetic scrolling (left/right) in the album view is a little slow, but visually this view is very appealing.
-Podcast downloading
Perhaps there is another podcatcher for OS2008 that I don't know about, but I love that Canola has this feature. It also pulls the name of the show and episode, too, which keeps things easier to organize and sift through. The process of setting up the feeds is a little tedious, but not horrendous. It would be nice if it would automatically download new episodes, but for now, I'm satisfied just manually downloading them.
-Volume control
This is something Canola shares with the default Media Player, but does it even better, since in Canola the volume control is always visible. Since the device does not have dedicated volume controls and Canola runs in full screen, this is really helpful. MediaBox lacks this feature, as far as I can tell, meaning that you have to go out to the Home screen to change the volume.
-Finger-friendliness
I can easily leave the stylus in the tablet with Canola, since everything is designed for finger use. Actually, this is pretty true with the default Media Player as well.
-Eye candy
Canola is just visually stunning. Icons, themes, etc. are very attractive.

Gripes:
-Exiting takes too many steps (as others have also commented)
-No FM Radio (not a necessity, but MediaBox has it)
-There are two steps to get to the list of videos, even though the second step only has one option. Perhaps there will be more options here in the future.

**MediaBox**
Likes:
-Dock-style interface
The dock-style interface makes jumping between media types very easy.
-Kinetic scrolling
The kinetic scrolling (up/down) seems to be a bit smoother in MediaBox than in Canola2. One reason for this might be that the areas you touch to scroll can not be used to select/open, so this is no conflict for the software to try to discern what your intention is with every touch. This also leads to one of my gripes...


Gripes:
-Seems to take a long time every launch to find media. (more than Canola, at least)
-When a track or video is playing, the controls are hidden. You have to actively switch to view them by clicking on the arrow.
-No volume control on screen
-No exit on-screen (At least with Canola, if you back all the way out it will ask if you want to exit...MediaBox forces you to use the hardware keys. Not a huge deal, but a little annoying)
-Media file thumbnails aren't clickable. I kept trying to click on the thumbnails themselves, instead of the very small triangle play buttons. This might be a design compromise to make the kinetic scrolling better, but I think it is something that needs to be weighed.
-FM radio frequency scanning doesn't stop on any stations. Also, if you try to find a station by clicking on the horizontal tuner bar, it is nearly impossible to fine-tune. I guess you really need to set up your stations outside of MediaBox.


Since MPlayer doesn't seem to play my movie files, I haven't really been able to fully review MediaBox's video playback features. One thing I did notice when playing the .avi N810 promo that came on the device is that it is kind of hard to get to a particular spot if the video by clicking on the time bar. Canola definitely beats MediaBox there.