My beloved N810 died last Tuesday. Well, not died died, but the screen stopped working. The topmost plastic layer is fine, but the LCD is probably cracked underneath. This probably happened while I was in an Apple store watching a friend of mine buy an iPhone. Coincidence?
I ordered a new one from Amazon that evening, and it arrived on Thursday. It had the oldest possible OS2008 version (and an incorrectly-formatted internal flash card), so I had to reflash it, and then install the OS feature updates one at a time, with forced a reboot in between. Untimely breakage of extras-devel didn't help either, and neither did the broken maemo-mapper package in extras. (Both are fixed now.)
Almost all of my data was on the miniSD card (including a week-old backup). To get the rest I had to blindly get the old N810 online and open a browser page (measuring distances from the corner of the screen) to get past the hotel wireless nag screen, and then guess its IP address, so that I could ssh in.
It thought maybe I could use arping on its MAC address to get the IP, but had no luck there. It didn't respond to broadcast pings either. Finally I had to ping every IP in my subnet individually and then grep for the MAC address in my kernel's ARP cache. Oh, how I wish Maemo came with avahi-daemon preinstalled! ssh mg-n810.local would have been so much simpler!
I'll try to get the old one repaired.
Update: thp describes how to get avahi-daemon on the tablet.
Update 2: the old N810 is repaired (screen replacement cost me 510 LTL, which is ~200 USD, at the local Nokia service center). It now serves as an Internet Radio station at home.