cheap mobile computing I wouldn't regret?

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?

survey for my Jewish readers

A survey in the first session of the Melton (adult-ed) program produced some results that struck me as interesting. I have a theory, but the class wasn't large enough to provide a good sample. So I pose the question to you. :-)

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