I would say that if measured by the knowledge and science involved the N800 is probably orders of magnitude more complex than a simple car like lets say from 20 years ago. I mean an Engine and all the other stuff in a car is plain Newtonian physics albeit on a high level. All it's parts could be produced with 60-70 year old machinery and a wokrking bare bone car could probably be produced with the tools and physics knowledge the old greeks had if enough effort had been put into it.
On the other side the knowledge needed to built something like the N800 is orders of magnitutes higher. It involves knowledge of complicated electromagnetic phenomena (just imagine how much you have to know about the nature of electromagnatic waves to build a working WiFi). It needs modern chemical science for it's display and extremely high tech laser technology as well as chemical science for it's CPU. Then it will need you to know a lot about mathematics including knowledge that is not even 60 years old. And it will need you some hundred thousand wokring hours for the programming. Maybe some hundred man hours if you have to rebuild everything from an assembler to a c compiler and so forth.
For the N810 you would have to know even more, for example building a GPS is impossible without knowledge of special and general relativity.

Let me give you another even simpler example, if you compare the first car in the world (build by Daimler Benz) with the first programable turing complete Computer (The Zuse Z3) you will find, that the first car was nothing more than putting together an engine and a cart (a technology known by the old Egyptians) all science needed to build an engine is probably some newtonian physics + the knowledge that hot gases do expand. (Everyone with a fire and a closed box with water in it can find that out easily).
While for the Z3 you will need to know about binary numbers, electronics like realys and probably a lot more...


Let me also give a little comment on the command line thing that was pointed out earlier. I'm a Linux user for about 3 years and though I know how to handle my system without ever touching a command line, I do think that it's by far the greatest thing on my computer and I wouldn't miss it (In the sense that if I had to choose between losing my GUI and losing my command line I would rather live without the GUI). I mean, yes, it's old fashioned but for many tasks it's just the best tool there is (like managing a system and it's devices) And though it probably sounds wierd to most people for me the CLI is the most natural interaction with the computer and the most flexible one by orders of magnitude. Unlike the GUI my command line is turing complete and therefor can compute everything that is computable.

A car has moving parts that you have to worry about. Most people take their cars to professionals when something significant goes wrong with them. Ever have to have your N800/810 towed? Do you have a little checklist on your tablet telling you when you need to have it serviced next? How often do you have your tablet inspected? How much are the annual licensing fees? Insurance? Have you had to make decisions about how much fuel you can expend on your tablet because of increasing prices? Are you licensed to use your tablet? Got any tickets lately?

What I am saying is, there are many dimensions to owning a car that simply aren't a factor with a tablet. So the car is more complicated.

There is NO way you can build a modern engine with 60 or 70 year old equipment. You might be able to build an engine from 25 or 30 years ago, but not a modern one. You could apply every single one of your points to a modern internal combustion engine and transmission, with a robust engine management system, variable valve timing, emissions control, limited slip differential, ABS, etc.

Well then again try to design a modern engine without the help of a computer^^

I have to agree, that operating a car involves more care and has more regulations though. But from a technological point of view a general car is much less complicated.

Cars these days have way more silicon than any internet tablet. The car is obviously far, far more complicated than any hopped up PDA.

Sure, you could build a very basic carburated 2-stroke engine fairly simply, but the same could be said for an Intel 4004. If we're comparing apples to apples, then a modern car is a much more complicated endeavor than an internet tablet.

Hell, the car IS a PDA-- on steroids and wheels.

How about the computing power used to navigate Apollo 11 to the moon almost 30 years ago vs. the N810?

Apollo 11 is said to have the power of 2 C64 so thats much much less than the IT but on the other hand it ran very low level software. Since ARM processors are pretty good at realtime though I guess if you put a hardened Linux RT Kernel (like the one by Andrew Morton) on it and than only command line software it could probably be safe enough for flight things, they use backup computers anyway and Linux has already been used for docking space craft (Search for "Flight Linux")

EDIT: I must correct myself, Linux hasn't been used to dock space craft yet, but the ATV (European Automated Transfer Vehicle (liek a Progress but bigger)) will be controled by Linux and is due to have it's first flight in the coming months

Quill pens and inkwells! OMG, heaven!

All we had were reed styluses that didn't last long and a dedicated attention to keeping the clay tablets moist

Some folks had all the luck

Come on my amaigo, you are not that old! I think, at least I speak for myself, there was the Casio 4 function calculator first, and then came the TI 59, and it then came with the TI59-2 which has the tiny magnetic strip to hold some simple i/o to do say a standard deviation. That was computer before the black apple. Oh, dont forget the Radioshack's TRS80.........not just quill pens and inkwells


bun