I bought a N800 back in Dec 2007 and it died a few months later, around March/April. Why do N800s seem to die so quickly? I was in love with that device but since I've had such a bad experience with Nokia, I'm scared to buy a new one.. Nokia Canada is currently selling N800s for 219$ CAD and free shipping, which is a pretty good price for a new package.

When my N800 died, I sent it back for repair, following the instructions on Nokia Canada's web site. I'm not really used to returning products, I usually buy new gadgets way before they die..

Two weeks later, I called Nokia and they were quite confused. The CSR told me they don't even repair N800s in Canada and they couldn't even trace my package. Since the shipping carrier couldn't provide tracking info on my package, they finally decided to refund the shipping price + insurance (200$).. Unlucky me, I guess.

For the curious types out there, the N800 wouldn't power-on. I tried swapping batteries, left the N800 overnight without any power, and so on. Sometimes, I could see the blue LED for a few seconds then nothing. I managed to flash the device before sending it back but that's all I could do.

Any N800 survivors out there? At least a year without any repairs/sudden death syndrome?

Er, since when? . . . :\

I know of very few people with dead N800s. Certainly nowhere near as many people with dead 770s.

I just had to send my N800 back to Nokia for repair (here in the US) and had the exact opposite result. They repaired it extremely quickly (5 days after they received it, it was returned via Priority Mail), and the device had been fixed. They even had a paper in the box listing which part(s) where replaced, in my case the LCD Controller Module.

I'm sorry you didn't have as much luck

BTW, I used the Nokiausa site to initiate the repair.

Come this Friday I'll have had my N800 for 1 whole year.

Is the clock ticking?

Ticking for what? I've had mine for nearly a two years without a single issue.

Use mine daily since day one of release @ CompUSA, Chicago.
No problems and no ticking...

My screen died after a year and a couple of weeks (more or less). I've seen here various reports of people having a dead/dying screen or tablet , but then those that don't have any problem don't usually complain, so I cannot say we are statistically significative.

I've been a member of a forum dedicated to devices (Palm) prone to failure (to say it kindly...) and I can tell you that the amount of "My <insert device here> is malfunctioning" traffic is lower by a factor of 10 here.

Back at that forum, we would always say what luca just did: that people usually don't join a forum to say "Hey! My device has been going strong for a year!", but do join a forum to say that their device failed. Although the argument has merit, I can tell you with 100% certainly that those Palm devices were crap. I replaced my TX 5 times in a year before it failed out of warranty.

To the contrary, these Nokia's (specifically the N-series) seem like they fail only a small percent of the time. I even joined this forum a month before I purchased my N800 to see how many people were complaining about hardware failure (and there were few). What can I say? I was traumatized after owning a Palm TX

This reminds me of when my Sony PSP died, allthough i had it for about 2.6 years.
And it died because i ended up dropping it on my concrete driveway. :P

Might as well offer the counterpoint to this, since there are far too few positive comments about tech in general.

I bought my N800 in March 2007 from a CompUSA that was closing down. I heard they were offering 30% off basically everything in the store, but when I got there all they had left was the N800 they were using as a display and demo unit, so it was likely abused by grubby CompUSA customers for ~3 months before I even got my hands on it for the first time. Since then, I've traveled ~12,000 miles with it, dropped it repeatedly on concrete, taken it to the beach (!), shoved it loose in a backpack, carried it in a pocket, and used it without a screen protector or stylus for the whole time. Had some really minor issues with sustained, heavy CPU usage, causing enough heat to make the touchscreen inaccurate but that went away when I started being more reasonable. Other than that: no problems. In terms of hardware, this thing has been absolutely solid.

-John