I've mentioned this in another thread before as a minor nuisance, but it seems to get more annoying (not getting worse, just getting more on my nerves) with time.

The backlight of my N800 is really uneven: both on the left and on the right side there is a considerable drop in luminosity; it appears as if the screen fades from white to light brown.

As said, it is only visible against a white (or at least clear) background, but in an editor window and in FBReader it is very visible and, by now, distracting.

Do other people experience the same problem? And has anyone sent their N800 back to Nokia for this?

Shadowing on the right side is a known issue, a byproduct of the light emitters. It manifests to various degrees. I've never seen shadowing on the left side, though.

I figured the right shadowing might have something to do with the LEDs, the 770 had the "cones of darkness" on that side. The left side shadowing is marginally less dark than the right, but it's still there.

It might be considered nagging, but it's annoying me almost at a subconscious level: it's as if the LCD screen is bent, with the center part bulging out to me, and somehow my eyes seem to fall for the illusion and put the top and bottom part (when I'm reading, that is) slightly out of focus. Creepy...

The first n800 that I got (broke) but it had no real noticeable shadowing on either side - the new one has slightly more on the right - but it is not bad enough for me to take it back.

j

Mine had this "curtain" effect on the right edge of the screen too, and a very slightly darker area in the top left corner. I should agree, as small nuisance as it be, it was surprisingly annoying when reading ebooks in FBReader, especially since it attempts to utilize every drop of screen estate and prints text with virtually no margins at all (by default, you can change it). The screen on my N800 looked exactly the same as on 770 in this respect. And I was really hoping this would be fixed in N800. Alas...

I'm thinking of getting the n800 to use FBreader, so this is discouraging. Does changing the background color make the uneven light less of a nuisance?

The shadow is only really noticeable on a white background.

Not really. It's not noticeable on a very dark background, but visible (for different values of $irritation$) on any other background.

Ok, for sake of argument, let me qualify my statement: it depends on the severity of the shadow.

I tried playing around with the background colours in FBReader and, other than setting it to black (which is not exactly making things better, obviously), I could not find a workeable shade that made me go, "Hey! this looks good."