Not sure why I am writing this, but I felt I ought to.
A couple of days ago I was using Maemo Mapper whilst leaning forwards against an open window at the hostel I'm currently in (first floor) when I dropped my 770. Two storeys. Onto solid concrete. The protective shell was on the back and the unit fell on its backside. The only damage done (except for numerous small dents in the shell and two nasty dents in the upper plastic corners) was a series of vertical black lines along the left hand side of the screen--what happened was that the whole image was moved by a few pixels to the right (sort of like a barcode, but one in which the "white" parts are continuous with each other). Furthermore, the digitiser correctly registers my taps. Otherwise, the unit is perfectly fine.
Hats off to Nokia.

Moral of the story: Nokia please bring back the hard shell in future models.

My last Nokia phone found itself thrown against brick walls at full force about 130 times over the course of its life and kept on working like a champ.

It's a shame that the thing that killed it was a drop off of a table...

The hard shell with its integration with the power management system was one of the best things about the 770. I constantly worry about my N800 vs my 770 I could throw in my pocket with my keys and everything else and not worry about it in the least. I have been very disappointed at Nokia's failure to deliver the long promised case for the N800. Their velvet eyeglass slip case which they threw in the box seems very ill suited to the N800, almost as if it was designed for something else and included as a complete afterthough. I actually feel that using the slip case increases the chance of damage, as it is so slippery that I've had my n800 go shooting out of it on several occasions.