ericbsmith -- DON'T RMA YOUR n800 YET! Read on...

Woohoo! Same thing, different day. I'm glad I'm not the only one who has trouble with my finicky tablet. Last night I turned my fully charged n810 off and went to bed (not because I'm a massochist, just because I want to keep testing until I am sure what the problem is). In the morning, it would not turn on. After plugging it in to the AC power again it began to respond to the power button, lighting up the LED blue and showing the Nokia logo screen briefly, but then briefly showing the battery charging image, and then sitting in a mode where the backlight was on low but nothing was displayed. After trying the power button a few more times to no avail, the green charging LED indicator stopped. Now it is back in non-working mode again. It has been about 10 minutes since I started with it this morning. I just unplugged it from the power and plugged it back in again, and I will let it sit for a bit. Nothing after five more minutes, so I unplugged from AC and removed the battery. Replaced battery, and VOILA! It turned on with first press of the power button (no special spot, just right in the middle).

I am now convinced that the power button is physically fine, but as some have theorized before me: for some still unknown reason the system (on these effected units) almost always goes into an apathetic mode where it doesn't care what you do with the power button.

With the battery out, I noticed a "2005" stamp on the circuit board beneath... could other n810 owners please report back what their production date stamp says? If there were a small number of these produced in 2005, and a larger number produced in 2006 and 2007, perhaps the older units from 2005 are the units with this power issue. That is my current idea for narrowing down the possibilties here.

REMINDER: n810 OWNERS, please post what year is stamped on the your circuit board beneath the battery. Thanks in advance!

Try with several short presses on power button...always work for me.

I tried 20+ short presses, holding the power button for 20 seconds, and several other methods. After letting it set over night I popped the battery in and it almost turned on. Hit it again and it turned on and booted right up. Turned it back off and again nothing, just can't get it to respond. I'm not going through this every time the battery dies or I have to actually power it down for some reason...

As YoDude stated before, there seem to be more than one effects at work.

One of them has to do with deep-discharging the battery. As far as I can remember, the N800 manual tells to charge the battery at least a certain amount of time before powering up - this also applies if the battery is dead.

My N800 had a phase where it went dead pretty regularly - caused by applications draining the battery completely in a few hours of standby (the main suspect is the canola configuration web server, but I didn't verify it enough to go to court). I had the impression that sometimes the tablet didn't completely shut down when I tried to switch it off (which I did to save battery power in the first place) and wore out the battery anyway.

Repeated attempts to switch on without recharging before (one or two were usually enough) drained the battery even more. Attaching the AC adapter and booting after about one minute resulted in the tablet starting up, realising the power was too low and going down again, draining the battery even further in the process.

After leaving the tablet on AC for a longer time (I didn't stop the time, shortest I remember to work was about 15 Minutes), it let me power it on again, but disconnecting the power cord too early resulted in an only partially charged battery again.

I didn't experience an empty battery in the last few weeks after eliminating some programs I suspected to be quite power hungry and disabling virtual memory on the sd card (which was also reported to possibly drain the batteries somewhere). Usage time in the process went up above the 3 hours or less of real usage I got before - but I continued to take the charger with me to work so it gets charged pretty often. I switch it off only occasionally now - in fact it reboots more often than that because of some cutting edge software I insisted to tryout.

Some of the magic described in the thread before may even work in this case because it takes some time to do it and lets the battery charge in the meantime.

cheers

Okay, i had the same problems you describe and I solved it by returning my N810 to the store and getting another one. My new one works as it should, so th conclusion has to be: the old one was either defective or not compatible with the current software.

My new N810 has "2007 94" stamped under the battery. I do not know what the defective unit had stamped there.

I bet your old one had 2005 stamped inside...

Can anyone else with the power issue on an 810 report what year they have stamped on the circuitboard under the battery? If all of us with the issue have 2005 guts, we'll finally have some rhyme or reason here.

I wonder if Nokia is replacing warranty returned 810s made in 2005 with newer units straight away with no delay. Maybe it would be worth it for us to send these defectives back after all. I could maybe imagine being without her for a week and a half tops, but if it would take longer than that I would probably just stop getting out of bed.

What are the chances that the first n810s made were actually n800 circuitboards in a different case with some different accessories/ports etc?

I find it hard to believe that any production N810 motherboards were manufactured in 2005. That's just waaaay too much lead time.

Does that mean that my unit is either a prototype n810 or a knockoff? I'm going to have to go with prototype, because this thing definitely came from Finland.

No, I'm just suggesting that the 2005 is probably not an N810 production date.

I don't have an N810 but might you be looking at a stamp on a chip? That may be the manufacture date of that particular chip... and unless the chip design changed there's probably nothing to worry about if you have one made in 2005 or 2007.

I seriously doubt any N810 boards were being made in 2005. Some chips on the board... maybe. But not the boards.

I have this same problem with my n800. I ran os2007 for a few days when I first got it and nothing like this happened.
Only after upgrading to OS2008 did it start not powering up. I just took the battery our for 20mins or so and popped it back in, it usually starts up then. Coincidence or maybe just bad luck, I don't know.