The thing is I already have a laptop and a desktop. As it is I leave my laptop at my sister's dorm room at UMD (I crash there occasionally since the commute is so long and I sometimes have 9 am classes) and my desktop is at home. In addition, I also have a desktop provided by CUA in my office.

So the only time the netbook would get use would be during the commute.. which seems kinda wasteful in the long run since I'm graduating in two years.

Then since I plan on moving in with my girlfriend by this time next year my commute will be sweet and short. So it would only be around an hour via Metro (if she doesn't drive me.. since our two campuses are only 16 minutes apart; UMD to CUA). And two hours total to get from there to work and back on the days I work.

Which is why I mostly ruled out netbooks. Unless I can find one really really cheap. But then there's the problem of where do I put it. I'm not kidding when I say my backpack is full. >.> It's a laptop backpack (meant to carry my 15 inch laptop) but with three classes worth of textbooks + notebooks + my lunch. Well. >.>

Maybe if I stopped carrying that huge SPSS book >.<.

I live up to my alma mater's mascot. The Terrapin. I look like a turtle with all those books in my back.

But anyway, I'm rambling (and about to go to bed since I'm tired). That's why I'm considering purchasing the n900 earlier then I was planning since it seemed it would be an ok fit (e.g. it can read PDFs fine and if I can at least do the n800's level of writing but with a hardware keyboard rather than the full screened on screen keyboard) Not as ideal as a netbook but then I wouldn't have to carry another device around.

The other thing (if this happens to be a misperception after reading my post) is that I don't need a full office suite working. It'd be nice, but I'm just doing pure writing. I'll do the editting, inserting references, final formating, and all on a real PC.

Maybe I can go see if my best friend will let me borrow his netbook...

@Laughing Man: ahh...
I don't think you can go wrong with any of the choices then..
If you can spare the cash, then I'm sure the N900 will do what you want with it just fine.. otherwise, a second hand netbook can be bought for probably 1/3rd of an N900 and takes up about 1/3rd of a text book's volume and boost your typing + multitasking speed when needed.

My 2c:
for quick rendering of pdf documents on evince, especially those containing plenty of images, or (horror!) those made of scanned book pages without ocr'ing into text, I convert to djvu format using the --monochrome --lossy parameters. Evince reads djvu quite well and quickly.

For writing essays: use notecase. Write your paper as a collection of several notes, which you can navigate quickly on your tablet, and then export as a single formatted document when you're done.

I have found the new keyboard to be surprisingly good for writing lots of text. My thumbs get tired after a few paragraphs, but that's probably because I'm still a newbie. But my speed after only a month is quite decent. Not as fast as a "real" keyboard (I'm a blazingly fast touch-typist) but good enough...

They've promised us KOffice for the N900, and that can handle (simply formatted) MS Word text. We'll have to see how usable it is in practice. My experience so far with OpenOffice on the N900 is that it is faster than my N800, but the 800x480 screen is frustratingly tiny. You either have lots of text visible at once, which is useful for moving blocks of text around, experimenting with sentence / paragraph order, etc... but with very tiny fonts, so it requires a steady hand and pinpoint precision with the stylus to highlight text correctly, or you zoom in and have only a small amount of text visible, and then it is difficult to get an overview and you spend a lot of time scrolling around.

I'm hoping that KOffice has implemented both a good panning and a quick zooming technique that makes it easy to get around and zoom in and out of a document. The browser makes it easy to navigate web pages, because you can flick your finger to get down to the bottom of the page, or zoom in on a section of text or a tiny button, but OpenOffice doesn't have any of this mobile device optimization.

If you just want to take notes, Conboy works pretty good for that.

@debernardis - what is djvu (nvr mind i wiki it) and how can you convert to it on the tablet? This is pretty important. And yeah, most texts are horribly scanned and not OCRd. I spent 30 minutes increasing the contrast on one with GIMP, page by page (I don't know how to automate GIMP on Windows). Horrible...

However, IF the N900 has google gears, then you can take docs OFFLINE! That would solve all the problems. No need to sync with the PC or worry about word/openoffice format.

I never tried to convert on the tablet, because the conversion is quite slow even on a desktop. On a linux box you can use pdf2djvu.
Easy debian can do it, too. So if you want to do it on the tablet, you could let it run overnight (don't forget to connect the charger!)

EDIT: there is also an online conversion service (I've never tested it):
http://www.djvu.org/any2djvu/

EDIT2: after a quick test, the online service converted a sample document much better and in a much smaller file. Definitely, I have to read again those conversion parameters!

removed. useless post by mistake.

I suggest you look into Imagemagick or Graphicsmagick for these kind of bulk image processing tasks. You can write a little shell script in Linux or a batch file in Windows to work your way through dozens of files.

(and they work on the tablets, too. I used Graphicsmagick on the tablet last week...)

When I was in school, if the class didn't require me to submit a Word document, I'd write it in LaTeX and submit a PDF. Not only did it motivate me to write (it made boring reports feel more like programming ) but my reports looked a lot nicer than everyone else's.
Since you're not working with the final layout (unlike a normal word processor), it would probably work nicely on a small device like the N900. Just compose in your favorite word-wrapping editor then compile it into a beautiful PDF later.

Yes, using Latex with the N900 would be great. You only have to write plain text and get well formated PDFs.

Does anybody know if this idea is possible with the N900? I only saw a discussion for the OS2008.