If you have been lusting after a N800, but the price was too steep for you, this may be your chance.  Buy.com has the Internet tablet on sale for $232.99.  This is a drastic drop from the $359 I paid just a few months ago.  This definitely makes the N800 a contender for an alternate e-book device.  Although the screen is smaller than the Sony reader, it is in color and has a backlight.  I have to admit that the smaller screen size is not a deterrent.  The screen’s resolution is great and I find I get just about as many paragraphs per page as I do with my Sony reader. The device also uses SD cards instead of RS-MMC cards and comes with two slots, one internal.  I have a 4gb and 8gb card installed.  That’s a lot of storage capacity for books, movies, and music.  Also, there is a wider range of applications available for the N800 than the N770.  Don’t forget that all of the applications are free. 

The only drawback is that the only reader software is FBreader, which means no DRM books.  For those of you who know how to convert your bought books, this won’t be a problem. For document reading and blog posting there are a few applications that work quite well.    I like using Evince for pdf and word document files.  For blog posting I use Maemo WordPy since my blog is powered by Word Press. It was a little tricky setting it up, but not difficult.  One thing though, if you use it to post to your blog, you will want to get a keyboard for it.  I have Think Outside’s Sierra BT Stowaway.  It’s easy to set up and both fit in my purse.  Other than games the best feature on my N800 is the RSS reader.  The N800 is great for RSS feeds.  Until I got one, I rarely read RSS feeds. Now my list of feeds has grown to about twenty.  So does tthe price drop mean that the next generation IT is right around the corner?