I have a trusty Ipaq 3835 that's been serving me well over the years, but it's getting time to move on.

I want a bigger screen, higher resolution, and wi-fi. For some reason, the idea of trying to cram this functionality into a phone leaves me cold. (I'd rather just carry a separate phone- no expensive data plans or battery-draining activities to worry about.)

The N800 is looking pretty good, but I absolutely need a word processor!
Someone mentioned Open Office was too big to port... I fired up Open Writer on my home PC and it looked like it gobbled about 36 meg... am I missing something terribly obvious?

Is Abiword or something else actually working on the N800 yet?

I also checked out the videos on youtube (which I've never been on before!) and it looked like there were some interesting emulators. Where the heck can I find out more about those?

It seems like the closest competition is the Palm TX... it's a big step down in hardware, but it's nicely pocketable and has DocumentsToGo. (And the screen is at least a small step up from 3.5" 320x200!)

My other option is to wait on a reasonable MID device... but so far even the smallest UMPCs seem too big, too expensive and, er, sort of overkill for a portable. (From a functionality standpoint and bang-for-buck, they seem to be on the losing side compared to a laptop.) Even the smallest form factors are looking less-than-pocketable and the pricing and software availability still seem to be big question marks!

Any other words of wisdom?

I've personally used maemopad and leafpad with no problems. I've also used Google Docs in Minimo. But word processing is not my primary activity on the N800 so those may not have the functions/options you are looking for.

Abiword is sketchy at the moment, but others are working on it this summer. Search the forums for more info.

As far as OpenOffice goes, I'm not 100% clear on why it's not possible - as you note, it doesn't take huge amounts of memory on load. My best guess is the fact that once you open documents, memory requirements can go up by huge amounts. Another issue with OpenOffice is that it's fairly "fragile" to compile (lots of compiler flags lead to a failed compile after 10-12 hours!), and has a lot of dependencies.

I dunno, 36 meg sounds like a lot on the tablet to me... am *I* missing something?

36 meg is a massive quantity of memory on the tablet. Furthermore, the porting effort would be absolutely monumental. Mind-blowingly monumental.