Good points. The two I had owned briefly were the SmartQ V7 and the Archos 5IT. The Archos had some strange Archos hybrid GUI and it was horrible. The SmartQ was a bit too kluge for me. But the NC seems to be really good, though I haven't rooted it and am only using the B&N GUI layer (or whatever it is called). The NC seems like a real tablet that doesn't require a lot of hacking.

Actually I started out with MS DOS and PC DOS (1981), moved to the original Mac OS on a Macintosh SE (1985?) during graduate school, then MS Windows 3.1 and on down the line when I joined the corporate world. I had some experience with AIX while working at IBM, but never cared for it much as I am a SLOW typist and proned to many typos! Me using command line OSes causes people near me to hear all sorts of colorful language, if you get my drift.

I'm definitely tempted to root my NC though, but will probably wait until B&N upgrades it to Android 2.2 and the Android gurus develop the rooting for that.

Thanks for all the info.