You meant "when I shovel my snow", right? Heh, no need to rub it in, winter here....

So where does one find this MP3gain?

I just bought the new Belkin Tune Cast universal FM transmitter, and tried it out in my truck only to find out I can't drive it hard enough to here it very loud over the truck stereo. Me thinks this need to be addressed by Nokia. Oh, BTW, this is on my N800.

You can mow your lawn with an iPod? What will they think of next??

It's true, I think that the Belkin fm transmitter is one of the three or four I've tried, and it isn't very loud. And in places like Los Angeles, there is lots of interference and radio stations competing on every single band.

Isn't there some kind of cheap amplifier that one could use in such cases?

But I did have a wonderful time playing The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time when vacationing a couple of summers ago. If it's relatively quiet on the road, and you aren't around interference, the fm transmitters are ok.

google for mp3gain. you need to run it on windoze or linux. I have not found a version for the tablets.

I have my system volume turned fully up, and when I use canola, it's volume is also fully up. The output from the headphone socket is low plain and simple. My 3 year old archos is much loader when usint the same equipment, either my ear phones (nokia or panasonic) or my mp3 transmitter into my car's stereo. That needs the volume increased by approx 25% compared to the archos, running MP3gain has reduiced the difference by about a third. The only downer is that running the volume at that level means that inerference is much more audible. Mplayer is also a problem when watching video in the room with the family TV
i don't anticipate a fix, just workarounds.
My guess is that this is deliberate to try and prevent the risk of people damaging their hearing from listening with the volume up too high, and leading to lawsuits. My archos, being from a french company, just had a sticker warning people.

i have a pair of koss 'plug' earphones i'm using. they boost the volume gain (?) by 2-3x. the nokia earphones it comes with are VERY low when it comes to volume/sound.

It might be a good idea to check your left speaker: http://www.internettablettalk.com/fo...ad.php?t=13225

Well, this is not a perfect solution but it works:

When you need real volume us KDE. It will push enough volume to blow out your ears if you want. This is just proof of my theory that the speakers can handle a lot more power and the headphone jack can jamb it out as well.

I'm not that concerned with the speaker volume, but now that CES 2008 is over and there is still nothing to compare to the n810, I'm strongly considering getting one and one of the major uses (other than web browsing) that I'll have for it is as a portable music player.

I have a very nice pair of headphones (Koss Pro-35A), if I attach them to the n810, can I expect to (at or near maximum volume) to get music that is fairly loud. At minimum, I want a volume that will block out noise around me in airports or on planes and city buses.

Is the low volume problem primarily with the included headphones or will a good quality pair of supra-aural headphones also suffer from low volume problems? I don't need to rattle my skull, but I am sometimes interested in music being pretty loud. Can the n810 manage that?

Can't say about airplanes since I haven't taken my N810 on one yet, but at least for me on a bus with Koss earphones, it's good. I keep volume in Canola2 at around 50% and can't hear bus noises at all. Anything more than that hurts my ears so I think the volume is just fine with good earphones (the ones that come with it suck, though). I haven't done any mp3gain tricks either. My bus ride isn't terribly noisy though but since I only have it at 50%, I'd imagine it would be fine for you as well even on a noisier ride. Speakers are bad in noisy situations (car), like mentioned above, but earphone volume seems good to me.

Don't remember exact type of my Koss earphones but they were like 40 - 60 euros or something like that so maybe that'll help you compare what you have with what I'm using. Hope this helps.

I can confirm this result as well... I too use KDE on my N810 and if I use the builtin Media Player while in KDE the volume can be adjusted (using KMix) to very, very, hurting your ears loud. So I agree that it is a software problem that is causing your volume issues.