First thing I did with PlayThing [name subject to change on a whim] was to fire up the tutorial on how to upgrade. Total upgrade time: less than 10 minutes.

I usually end up having both browsers open (although my #1's Firefox). This has more to do with my tendency to have open a lot a lot of tabs at the same time I'm just... um... not that good at concentrating on one thing long enough, usually, to have less than 10 tabs open so I tend to spread 'em across two browsers. I bad.

I was speaking about the intuitiveness of getting preferred radio stations bookmarked on the N800, specifically... especially if it's paired up with the problem of station web sites not being rendered true in the N800 broswer window. Who knows, though. Perhaps you have secretly uncovered a conspiracy to further discourage direct radio streaming. That'd be neat!

I guess it depends on the radio stream itself, too. I would think that any station that relies on pledge drives (like any of the National Public Radio (NPR) stations in the States and WFMU) *want* internet listeners. God knows WFMU got a $125US pledge from me last year and I'm clear across the continent from the station's home in New Jersey. I also think a sizeable minority of their operating budget is coming from non-US pledges.

I've found CKRW have also been very faithful to their steams. But, again, they're pledge-based since they're part of NPR.

I think the thing about the tutorial that threw me off a bit was the use of the BBC stations. The ones I wanted were conveniently pre-installed for me so perhaps they're the easiest ones to program in the first place. If someone was looking for a specific radio station and the procedure was slightly out of the BBC example, the person's hooped. Maybe a couple of real world examples that address things like which of the most common plug-ins will work and ways to pinpoint the streaming addresses? A Part Deux, if you will?

Like I mentioned, I had two major problems;

1. I didn't get from the tutorial which player icons worked the best (iTunes, WinAmp, RealPlayer, QuickTime, etc.) or what I should be looking for in streaming formats (.pls and .m3u) so I didn't know what to chose once I got to a web page that had player options.

2. My browser simply didn't pick up some of the boxes on a couple of station web sites that contained links to the stream - unless I concurrently ran my iMac's browser that rendered the page properly and simply guestimated where a box *should* be on the N800's browser page.

As a newbie, I wouldn't know at this point *what* the expectations are for this browser so boxes not being rendered correctly doesn't seem like an obvious sign of trouble (if it is... I'm still not sure if my browser's kinky or it's just the way the browser handles some pages).

Update: I just got back from a friend - the same one who showed me his N800 and got me excited in the first place. His browser in OS2008 clearly showed the erstwhile missing boxes on the www.kcrw.org web page. So I went to investigate and, because pages are so slow to download, I'd chosen View -> Show images -> Never. Once I reverted to Always, the boxes appear as they should at that site. But the page is still slow to load (14 seconds).

At www.novaplanet.com, if you don't tap on the listening box quick enough, it still gets eaten up by a text box that's been shoved over from the far right. And it still takes 16 seconds to load the whole page.

My iGoogle page, accessed by his N800, is slightly better than when it's on my N800 - my gadgets have only been shoved over to the right about 2/3rds across the page (making them irritating, but possible, to read) while they get shoved 3/4ths of the way across the page in my browser (making them too irritating to bother with at all). In this case, I'm sure we were both on the same screen settings.

His N800 also has 'Rhapsody' installed (even though he bought it in Canada), which I can't do it since I guess the application can detect that the application is in Canada. So, clearly, something's happened between the time he purchased his N800 and me purchasing mine

So maybe the problem for me figuring out the radio station conundrum breaks down to this:

1. I didn't know what audio format in particular to look for,

2. I'm not sure if my browser's rendering pages correctly so it's sometimes hard to even find the audio options on the page.

3. I haven't a clue how efficient this particular browser is at rendering pages, now that I've had a bit of a chance to compare two N800s. The New York Times home page, www.nytimes.com, takes about 18 seconds to load (and looks like crap). Is this normal? I dunno. I'm a verbose newbie, after all.

These page times don't seem to change much if I'm at home or out with the N800 in a cafe. So I have no frame of reference to figure out if my frustrating internet radio search was caused by me missing a fundamental step or some factor that had nothing to do with me (like a still less-than-ideal browser).

On the other (final) hand, I gots me some of my favorite radio stations now and I've hooked up an old pair of good RCA-plugged computer speakers so now I can listen to the radio in my bedroom.

Which, for some reason, makes me very happy.