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

Brightness

[brokengoose.livejournal.com]

One thing to consider with both new and used machines: screen brightness and contrast. Cheap machines (and very thin expensive machines) use fewer backlighting tubes, so they're dimmer. That's not a problem in a dark room, but for some of them, it's bad enough that it -is- a problem in a well-lit room. I'd strongly recommend tha you ensure that there's a decent return policy at whatever place you acquire the laptop . If not for brightness, then for whatever odd issues you don't think of before purchase.

Like others have said, web browsing on a PDA sucks. The biggest problem is that web page designers want to cram as much stuff onto a page as possible. Most don't even test pages below 1024x768 any more. As someone who doesn't want to devote the whole screen to a browser, I find this really annoying. The Opera browser is probably the best solution that I've found for mobile browsing, and while it's available on a lot of things, it's not quite everywhere yet.