cheap mobile computing I wouldn't regret?

[cellio]

Opinions wanted:

Occasionally I travel and would like to bring along a text editor and internet client. This is for email, web (including LJ), and the like, not high-demand work that requires top-end processing. The text editor is for taking notes (e.g. in lectures) and composing email/LJ entries/essays/sermons.

I suspect I want a laptop rather than a PDA, but the PDA is appealing for its portability. Can I run emacs on one? SSH? What do web sites tend to look like on that itty bitty screen? If I'm in a hotel room somewhere with a PDA rather than a laptop and I try to catch up on LJ, would that suck?

If I go the laptop route, are there reputable sources where I can buy last year's model (or even older) for not too much money and without too much fear of imminent failure? (I think this means I don't want a used machine.) Dell sells a new no-frills laptop for $500; can I spend a couple hundred dollars less without regretting it?

Either way, I think I want the following features:

• Ability to run: browser, emacs, ssh, ftp
• Support for both wireless and wired network connections
• Ability to plug in a mouse (and, if PDA, keyboard)
• Additional USB port (for thumb drive, camera-card reader, etc)
• Works pretty much out of the box; I'm not ready to start with a naked machine and a Linux CD
• Decent battery life (assume I would plug in whenever possible, but that doesn't always work in lectures, on planes, etc)

If whatever I get allows me to bypass corporate network restrictions that prevent me from reading my email etc from my desktop machine, so much the better, but I'm not really sure what would make a difference there.

What factors do I need to consider that I haven't thought of yet?

Comments

[530nm330hz.livejournal.com]

I got a Dell Axim x50v when my Clie died. It's acceptable for email and my LJ friends page, not so much for reading LJ posts-with-comments pages. I can whip up most software that I want for it using C#, which has become my preferred language for RAD. (So, for example, I wrote my own PIM and a crossword-solving environment that reads standard .puz files.) But I use it to catch up on the world when I'm on vacation, at my parents' house, or during long boring meetings at work. :-)

Text entry is painful. In theory, I could use a Bluetooth keyboard but I haven't bothered.

I can hook it up to any VGA monitor or projector, which I've used (once) to give a presentation.

Before my Clie I loved my Zaurus. It ran Linux, so there was emacs, SSH, etc. And it had a decent thumbpad. But alas I broke off some of the pins on the CF slot while preparing to reflash it with a ROM upgrade, and that was that. :-(

The new ultra-mobile VAIO looks really cool, but I don't think it's actually available yet and will probably run close to $3K.