I too would like to see printing enabled, but for all those who are apparently taking Apple's Newton as a shining beacon for everything the N800 should become (and in all honesty, I am one of those people), I'd like to rain a bit on the Newton printing parade.

Newtons can print, I agree. But!!!! 99% of the Newton printer drivers are bitmapped drivers that do little more than send a bitmap image of the screen to a printer. The result is blocky to extremely blocky.

The only "decent" printer driver on the Newton is the PostScript driver, and that will only work with Apple-enabled PostScript printers. I had to obtain a PostScript card or my LJ4 and an AppleTalk card (I think nowadays this would require a time machine, the use thereof) to get it to produce correspondence quality output.

(There is an alternative for those who don't have PostScript printers; this requires a Linux desktop, a Newton supported ethernet card (good luck on finding one of those), a crossover cable and more than a passing knowledge of the Linux printing subsystem -- not cups! the old one! -- to get a Newton to print to virtually any printer via the Linux desktop)

The biggest hurdle for printing on the N800 is that, as things are now, it cannot be done hardware-wise without at least a networked printer present. I happen to own a bluetooth-to-parallel/USB converter, but these things aren't exactly easy to come by, nor are they cheap. The only other option would be a fully working USB host-mode for the N800.

Of course, we all could buy bluetooth-enabled printers; I haven't really followed the market on those, but something tells me it might be tricky to find a non-gadgetryminded one.