So my n800 arrived on Thursday, and I've been slowly migrating stuff across from my Zaurus. In general I am extremely impressed with the IT. It does everything I want ... GPE PIM has all the functionality I need, FB Reader I was using on the Z anyway, Canola is really nice. I'm looking forward to getting Mapper working.

Which leads me on to the only area where I am really disappointed with the device, and that is its audio quality.

The Z's audio playback is superb. Silent is silent. The n800 has this really annoying hiss. Maybe I wouldn't hear it if I was using the supplied headphones, but I have a set of Shure ear buds.

I'd be interested to know if this is common to all devices, or if anyone has a view about whether this is a hardware or software issue.

I've been reading these forums for a week or two now. Its interesting to see how much discussion parallels the threads that can be found on the Zaurus forums - possibly bricked machines, lack of a good PIM suite, perceived instability etc... I almost feel at home. Have a look at http://www.oesf.org/forums to see what I mean.

I was using Zaurus's for several years. I started with a 5500, then a c760. I still have a c3100 which I'm selling shortly.

In some ways, when Sharp produced the Zaurus originally, they seem to have had similar goals to Nokia, I'm sure for very different reasons. But at some stage, they missed the point of open source, and gradually gave less and less support to the developer community, so that now most have drifted off to do other things.

I think Nokia are in danger of making the same mistakes. Maybe I'm missing something, but I don't see Nokia really engaging with the community. At least Sharp, in the early days, had someone who actively watched the forums and offered assistance.

Sharp, with the Zaurus, produced a really nice device for its time. It would still be the best out there if they had built in wireless and bluetooth, and increased the size of the screen a bit. But instead the stopped making it.

They sat back and waited to see if the developer community would produce the killer apps for free, and of course that didn't really happen.

I see history repeating itself. Let me know if I'm talking nonsense ...

Cheers,

Mike.