Simple.

The Power of Cheese. nunna, nunna, nunna, nunna, nunna, nunna, nunna, nunna...

For 10,000 years man thought the moon was made of cheese. In 1969 we went there and proved it wasn't... we haven't been back since.


***

When I first got my N800 I compared it to a lot of things (mostly to justify the cost) I never was able to so in fairness to the OP, in my case it was an expensive toy.

What it does have over PDA's is speed, persistent storage, and battery life.

Now back to the toy thing...

When I first saw the potential for WiFi's spontaneous, portable, remote net connections 2 or 3 years ago I went out and bought the best hardware/software I could find. An iPAQ 4150 with BT and WiFi and paid close to $500 for the thing.

Talk about disappointment. Yeeeesh, the browser was crippled by MS so that it would only load their favorites easily and then it directed you to some pocket PC site that promised you great content (for a subscription fee of coarse), it couldn't load WAP pages, and JAVA script wasn't even a consideration.

It did have a PIM and MS apps however, if I wanted to sync the content with my desktop apps I needed to convert it. This sometimes required costly third party apps. After about 6 months of tweaking and another $100 in apps I had something worth carting around with me.

That is until the battery went dead...

Now everything had to be reloaded, re-tweaked, and in some cases re-registered with the software house before the app would work again. (Silly me. I used my middle initial for the owners info the second time and didn't know this change would affect the hash used to generate some licenses.)

In any event the experience was so painful that I was afraid to use the thing away from the charger for very long. This made the thing less than even a toy so for 2 years it sat and I didn't use it.

Then came the N800, woo hoo! As a toy I take it everywhere. Because of battery life when I do find a connection I have the time to configure it and download or search, load, and view what I need. Because of persistent storage I no longer have to worry about how far from a charger I am... I never get the dreaded message.

...and as far as speed goes it is a hell of a lot quicker than walking to the library, searching a catalog, selecting a book and finding the page that contains the information I need.

Some dude once said speed is relative or some such.

So is comparing the N800 to anything else out there.

BTW, my first home computer was a toy by my definition. I didn't need it for work because no one had them. Most couldn't imagine at the time what use would come of it...

I'm thinkin' the same goes for the IT's.

...things change.

Also... Because I have the N800 for what I bought the iPAQ for I now use the iPAQ more!
I loaded a navigator program to it, bought another BT GPS receiver (after seeing what Navicore could do on the N800), and have relegated it to my work vehicle where I can keep it on charge.