Oops, sorry. I was in the same situation till recently, waiting for a port of Privoxy which thankfully happened quickly enough thanks to bradb. I switched over this weekend and it's everything everyone has said about it - almost feels like a different machine...
Well I gave it a 15-minute test run, and it's not all that bad.
I have never used Pan on a desktop before, so I was discovering the app on the Nokia.

First, after configuring the news server in the setup wizard, I refused to let it download the groups list.
But then, I was unable to find a way to manually add a few newsgroups by name, which is a design error for a small platform. So with some trepidation I set it loose and let it download. Like Axolotl I really thought at one time that this was going to freeze or reboot the machine (went real sluggish, app was not repainting itself etc.). But I just let it do its thing and after a while it came up with the whole list (about 47,500 groups). Maybe the swap helped :-)

Evidently it had problems with such a huge list : scrolling and searching through it was a pain. I finally subscribed to a few groups and downloaded some headers without problems. But at first when I tried to read individual articles it failed to load them (the button at lower right turns red and brings up the log viewer showing assert errors, very nice feature !).

At that point I closed down the app to check what had been written to 'disk'.
In the .pan dir I found :

- a server_name_nosub.dat file, evidently a newsrc equivalent, over 2MB,
- a similar .idx (index ?) file, over 3MB (!?)
- a .bak version of each :-)
That's over 10 MB for just one news server...

I then relaunched the app, using only the subscribed groups list, and this time had no problem going through the headers, loading and reading articles, etc. I didn't test posting/mailing but this feels like a quality app and I'm pretty sure it works well overall. With a reasonable quantity of data to manage it doesn't *feel* slow at all.

Overall I'd say the main shortcoming of Pan for the 770 is the use of nonstandard newsrc files and/or the inability to add groups manually. This makes it difficult to skip the crummy initial experience and get down to business immediately with a reasonable set of groups, at which point things get smooth enough.

Another one (very common with ported apps) is incomplete Hildonization : not-quite-maemo look and feel, partially visible dialogs, no full screen mode, a very crowded (and not optional) toolbar...

OTOH there are very nice touches : total and automatic localization (the app automatically switches to your 770's native language) ; the groups/headers/message viewer arranged as a notebook instead of panels, which makes it very usable on a small screen ; and a very complete set of features, with GNKSA compliance, which is nothing to sneeze at.

All in all the most impressive newsreader I've ever seen on a PDA-like machine. Would probably not need very much work (if done by a knowledgeable, usability-minded person) to become a very good fit for the Nokia.