Many people have fallen for Apple’s iPod Touch which is the iPhone without the phone. It gives people the option to have all the features the iPhone has to offer without having to get an AT&T contract or going through the process of canceling your current cell phone plan. The only thing the iphone has that the iPod Touch doesn’t is 3G Internet, phone capability, and a fully plastic case.  Personally, I had wanted to get an iPod Touch as a replacement Media player until I realized that my Nokia N800 Internet Tablet can actually do almost everything the iPod Touch does and more for less money.

The fact is the N800 isn’t a iPod Touch, it doesn’t have the sleek UI or design but it has a lot more options and  is way more open. The Nokia N800 starts around $200 and comes with a 2 GB internal memory card and 2 GBs of RAM. The N800 also has an additional SD card slot easily accessible and great for transferring files and storing media files.  Plus, application on the iPod Touch must be acquired through the official Apps Store and have to be approved by Apple before going on the market. The applications for Maemo can be acquired either through repositories and installed through there or they can be downloaded as a .deb, install, or source code file from any website and installed on your device. Of course they aren’t guaranteed to work but, you will just have to go through some trial and error testing. Then for storage you can go to Newegg, Amazon or any other retailer and buy a SD memory card and simply fill it with your media files and what ever other data you would like to have on your device. I was able to find a 16 GB SDHC card for $30 on Newegg and that combined with the cost of my N800 makes it $230 while an iPod Touch of that capacity is $299.

Also realize, that with the N800 you can do almost anything you want with your N800 as far as installing software and lets you do what you want with it. I was also considering comparing this to the iPhone but the fact is, that the N800 does not have a cell phone or 3G Internet although it does have Voice Over IP like Skype and Gizmo that lets you make calls to landlines over the Internet for a small fee.  But it still is relying on Wifi being available so it is still not able to compete. All-in-all before spending on a iPod Touch think about the N800 as an option it could do everything the iPod Touch does and can be used for almost anything you can imagine.