Look, if you're a student and need to save money, you don't need two 16-gig cards; I think that two 4-gig cards would be fine for most purposes. Or get the N810 and get less memory but you would have the keyboard.

I am perfectly happy with the virtual keyboard; though I have a bt keyboard, I rarely bother to use it.

I wouldn't use the default Notes program -- I would use Maemomapper+ program and scribble the notes in handwriting. Then if you later wanted to transcribe the notes into something that wasn't scribbling, you could do it at your leisure.

There is a program called Notecase for the N8xx that you should try also -- it lets you put the notes in a more hierarchical form.

But to tell the truth, I would be thinking about getting an eee pc and using a mind-mapping program like freemind. That would be very cool with notes. The N800 doesn't really work well with mind-mapping (If you aren't familiar with it, just think of it as a very free-form outliner) because it uses screen real estate more freely than a small screen accommodates.

Maybe the ideal would be using a N800 and maemomapper+ to scribble the notes, then go back and transcribe the notes onto a full-fledged computer or laptop and memory mapping software. There is also a memory mapping program called Compendium that is also free and works well (needs Java) that I just discovered yesterday...