Andy,

I'm new to this and working and experiencing some of the things you are
asking about.

I have a mobilepro 780. I've installed netbsd on it using a microdrive.
See below for the few answers or comments I can provide

> I'm looking for a HPC device to generally play with. It needs to run
> X
> so I can play some games, possibly use a graphical browser, etc.

I've been able to start X but so far it is not very useful. The 780 has
a half vga screen 640x240, I think. This is not much for X. I'm looking
for ways to make this usable. I need a window manager with the
following features:
   * minimal decorations and icons - need all of the pixels available
for the applications
   * since there will be few decorations and icons I need key board
commands to do things like selecting the next window, maximizing a
window, etc. 

I have not been able to install a browser. So far there seems to be
dependencies that prevent the browser from installing. I can't even
install lynx yet!

> And
> I'd like to use a large CF card to store data or put the NetBSD
> filesystems.

I have a 4GB microdrive. It works fine for this. Lots of room for the
NetBSD packages. 

> I'd like to use a wireless ethernet adapter for my house
> and when I go somewhere with a hotspot. I want it to boot and run
> reliably.

I have a netgear something 401 card. It works great. The only problem
is that if I remove the card I must reboot to reenable it. I suspect
there is something simple I can do but haven't discovered it yet.

> Is there any specific advantage to getting the 880 over the 800 other
> than CPU power?

I don't know about these specific models. I think one of these is the
full vga version of the mobilepro 780 that I have.

> Also, if I install NetBSD, what is involved in recovering the CE
> operating system? I read about a hard reset button that supposedly
> will re-install the base system. Will this still work after
> installing
> NetBSD?

The CE operating system is in ROM and can be booted by pressing the
reset button on the bottom of the device. You can later boot netbsd via
the netbsd bootloader, which is a windows ce application. On the
surface this sounds like you can have a dual boot system...

However, there are some significant gotchas that basically disable CE.
When booting, netbsd takes all the memory for the device. When you
reset to get back to CE there is nothing from the CE environment
remaining, except things that are on a CF card. I would like to save
the contacts, calendar, etc information on the cf card so that I can
access that information from CE, but I have not found a way to do this.
CE becomes the bootloader for netbsd.

> I've never used one of these handheld devices, any advice would be
> appreciated.

Good luck. Let me and the mailing list know how you do.

-Kelly