WSOD appears to be limited to a minority of devices (as Nokia has expressed it in a different context). If a 770 has not gone WSOD by now, it probably won't. Most sufferers from WSOD report that it happened while they were booting up with the charger attached. It is not difficult to avoid doing that. Before I heard about the boot-charger-WSOD connection, I used to boot my 770 up on the charger all the time. It never did any damage, but now I avoid it just in case.

OS2008HE is newer than the software that comes supplied with the N800. It is a tight fit in the 770's internal flash but runs very well if you clone it to a partition of at least 500MB on a media card. This forum contains a lot of information about cloning the rootfs. You might also find it helpful to search for "Fanoush kernel": the 770 runs slowly by 2010 standards, but it can be made much faster with Fanoush's 48 MHz kernel modification.

Cloning to the MMC is also a good idea on the N800, and many users report finding it helpful on the N810.

At one time it was difficult to find a larger-capacity replacement for the 770's original 64 MB media card. (It has to be RS-MMC or MMC-mobile, not SD.) These days, you can buy a 2GB MMC-mobile on eBay for under $9, including shipping from Hong Kong to anywhere in the world. (That is a fixed price, not an auction.)

Maybe you should try. As noted above, most of the "trouble" involved is the cloning to MMC, which you would also have to do if you want to get the best out of N800 or N810. While partitioning the MMC, it is a good idea to create a large swap partition. At present, I have a 704 MB bootable partition and a 388 MB swap partition on a 2GB MMC-mobile card. Without a large amount of swap, the browser is inclined to crash frequently in OS2008HE, but this problem is fixed by adequate swap.

My wife and I have often listened to Venice Classic Radio on the 770's OS2008HE Media Player (not Pandora). Radio Swiss Classic is in the Media Player's directory, but I regret that I am using a 56K dialup connection at the moment and cannot report on the quality of reception for the Swiss station. [EDIT: I've listened to it now, and it sounds good. It also works well at room volume when the 770's output is fed through a stereo.]

When we listen to Venice Classic on a broadband connection, we get excellent results using two pairs of earbuds with a two-way splitter. The 770's loudspeaker does not give good sound. However, if you love classical music, you won't like the sound from the N800's speakers, either. I can not give an opinion about the N810.

There are some very nice things about the N8x0 (screen rotation has finally been perfected for the Diablo OS, for example), but the 770 still has its uses. There is nothing wrong with it for internet radio. If you don't want to use earbuds, you can connect the 770's audio output to the auxiliary input of your stereo system. As mentioned before, the N800's speakers are not good enough for classical music, either.

I don't know where icebox gets his information about the abundant supply of N800 and N810 at low prices. The opposite is being reported by other members of the forum (qole, for example). The 770, on the other hand, really is available at low prices. It is around $55 for a well-kept one from an eBay seller with 100% positive feedback. You can probably get one for much less, if you don't mind a few scratches or the absence of original earbuds/MMC/charger/USB cable.

[PS : FURTHER COMMENTS ON OS2008HE. The only problem I have had with OS2008HE is that the Image Viewer needs more processing power than the 770 can provide. It is inclined to freeze and crash if you try to view image files larger than 2 MB each in quick succession. It is very slow at editing images (i.e. tasks such as reducing the files to a suitable size for email attachments).

Poor experience with the Image Viewer in OS2008HE was one of my main reasons for buying a N800 a few months ago. Ironically, the N800 and N810 do not interact well with cameras. They are more user-friendly than the 770 for USB connections of the simplest kind, but they get into serious trouble with more complicated gadgets: see https://bugs.maemo.org/show_bug.cgi?id=3281 . USB host mode takes more preparation on the 770. However, once activated, it uses a desktop-quality OHCI controller and can run applications such as gphoto2 without problems.]