£800 !! :helpsmilie:

I can't pay that for something I'll probably sit on and break :innocent:

Ted,

I'd probably stick to a little netbook. My Wife's got a little Samsung, it cost almost bugger-all and is surprisingly fast and the battery lasts for ages.

If I was feeling flush, I'd consider a tablet with a plug in keyboard.

Ted, if it helps, here's what I recommend.

I had a couple of 10 inch netbooks before and they suffered from smaller screen resolution and no onboard video card (made it very hard playing movies or editing pictures)

I switched a couple of yrs ago to a 12.1 inch 1366x768 netbook with a dedicated onboard video chipset. It cost about 350 quid and edits full res pics in photoshop, does HD video editing (slowly - but it does it) and has a bigger full size keyboard (the 10 inch netbooks had a squeezed slightly smaller keyboard)

Netbooks arent really made any more but you might be able to find some old stock or find one on eBay. I can do 10 times as much on my more powerful 12 inch netbook than I could on my 10 inch netbook.

Asus eee 1215 is what I am taking on the road with me. Check it out mate.

Checking it now..... Netbooks are a dying breed. Shame really.

Acer are still making them though....

Acer Travelmate 11.6. About £420 with high spec and still on Windows 7 (I HATE WIN8)

ASUS Transformer
 

Hey Ted,

Doing a quick browse it seems nobody mentioned the Transformer. Have a look at the new 10,5" (or so) ASUS Transformer, laptop and tablet in one with Quad Core and Windows Pro so you can install programs like Mapsource! Price on the mainland Euro 350,- It is that I have a ASUS Eee netbook which works fine for me but if I were looking for one, this would be it! (HD) Video editing may be a challenge but you did not mention that as requirement. The Transformer is considerably slimmer and lighter than my Eee netbook and I think Windows 8 is very nice :)

Cheers,
Noel

Playbook
 

Blackberry Playbook and Z10 both in Otter case. Price is right for Playbook, no moving parts and mine has 80,000k through deserts and mountains rattling around in my topcase. Poynt, GasBuddy, map apps plus browser and e-mail is all I need. I'm travelling, I don't need the bells and whistles or problems of a laptop which I have experienced in the past. Travelling terrain and vibrations can be deadly for disk drives and keyboards. This works for me and my needs, others may require more sophistication.

I bought a "touchlet sx7" no I'd never heard of them either. Runs with android has a 7 inch screen , can be used with a Bluetooth keyboard. What swayed it for me was the dual sim card slots. Buy a cheap sim card on country entry and still be available on your normal number. It cost 170€ ....yes it has its limits but I've been using mine over 8 months and have left the netbook in its bag.
Its big enough to use as an e-book reader, video screen is big enough, I do Skype and telephone with it via a BT headset as it looks daft holding such a TV to your ear.....and it has a USB port for an external drive. They do a 10 inch one too but that ain't going in your pocket :-) :-)

sent from my thingy, using whatchamacallit

That's what I like about the Windows tabs as well. Light and compatible standard hard and software like Garmin software.
The eee that I had crapped out all the time. Hard drive fragmentation, according to our it, is often to blame for reducing performance. But sold state memory will prevent that.
I tend to leave the editing of pics and video for when I'm done and back working.

I'd been struggling with the same question as Ted for awhile before starting my current trip. The last one I did was with a $150 ten inch netbook and for me that was fine. I'd have taken it again on this trip but some b**** stole it a couple of months back.

The new solution is 7 inch tablet and so far I'm pleased with it. The pro is the very light weight and the ease with which I can carry it in the back pocket of my bike jacket waterproofed in a zip lock bag. No more worrying about is my laptop secure, or the pain of having to get it out of my luggage. Also battery life is much longer and recharging much easier. The con is that it is harder to type from. Originally that was a killer for me, but then I discovered Google's swipe keyboard (free app) which makes a significant difference for me and make composing posts like this with the onscreen keyboard an acceptably quick if not a painless activity.

Every thing is a compromise but for me, who has much lower IT needs than Walter, at the moment this solution seems an acceptable one.

Tablet or small, rugged laptop? Android, Mac, or windows?
 

We are in the same dilemma, though we even want to be able to edit the movie clips we shot with the GoPro right away :-) As we don't want to face the horror of editing all this stuff after coming back from a 4-5 months trip... rather start it on the road. :mchappy:

We also initially thought about just taking a tablet (further tech family would include an iPhone 3, samsung S2 plus smartphone, garmin and the GoPro - and possibly the BRCK modem, if we can get it :cool4:). But now I think a tablet won't be enough... there are apps for this, but I know video editing is a fidgety work as it is on the laptop, I can't imagine doing that on the tablet... anyone any experience with video / sound editing on a tablet?

Also, we have a Garmin and wanted to connect it to the tablet to do the route planning there (and then load it on the Garmin). Seems that there are no apps for Garmin! (or at least no apps for android or mac-tablets, and I don't know if I want to go windows for a tablet...).

And lastly, a friend here in SA told us he wrecked two harddrives in his laptop while just commuting with the motorcycle to work (commuting on dirt roads, though :scooter:). The vibrations just wrecked it.
So he strongly recommend to get a device with a solid state drive. Which is quite costly. Anyone had similar experiences?

I've done a lot of rough miles with all sorts of laptops over the years. I even had a massive crash with a 17" Dell which got thrown down the road and it still worked perfectly... The trick is to NEVER have the HDD active whilst moving. Some make the mistake to have the laptop in sleep or hibernation mode which still has the HDD ticking over. With vibrations, it will kill it....

However,

Solid state Hard drives have really come down in price and they are far more reliable and faster to access. The only downside is that their capacity is a lot smaller for the same price.

But that's what USB flash drives are for.. Once or two of those and you should be okay. You can get a whopping 128GB flash drive for about £50 quid now and MASSIVE 256GB one for about £120.

USB flash drives are GREAT for travelling.


I think I've made my mind up..... I'm getting a 10" netbook with Win 7 and a sold state drive and a couple of 128 GB flash drives.

Me too, keeps you in the travelling state of mind for another couple of months as well! :D

PS; My Eee hasn't crapped out on me yet, just recently found out that the Super Hybrid Engine can be manually adjusted between 5% till 30% overclocking speed. Mine was set at 5% and I now set it at 30% (in the Bios) and its a lot better now, not so shocky anymore, reduces battery life though.
Cheers,
Noel

WHICHEVER SYSTEM YOU GET PROTECT THE SCREEN: The constant jostling in your luggage will imprint the pattern of the keys onto the screen, so always stick a bit of cloth (clean hanky will do) between the screen and the keyboard.

Haven't heard of netbooks in a few years. I travel with a 13-in Macbook Air but concur the 11-in would be great if space/weight was that essential (it's not for me). Solid-state storage, so no hard drives to crash. Battery run-time of about 12 hours and I have Windows XP (I have Win 7) running under Parallels Desktop so I can use Mapsource and some astronomy software that's Windows-only.

Yes they are expensive, but the environment with iPhone integration is brilliant and it will last for three as many years as an already-obsolete netbook.

hmmm. I didn't know you could put Win 7 on a Mac Air.. I thought there was a problem with it not having USB 3.0 drivers and the Mac only having US 3 ports. :confused1:

I travel with a little net book. Had the book for a good three four year's. The only down side is the memory. Not big enough. So get a couple of one ter bite drive's that you plug in. Just down load to the spare hard drive at night. You will need a main supplies to drive the book as it take's it time.

It's worked well for me in all these year's. So I see no reason to change what I have. The other up side to me is. If I lose or get stolen the book, I still have all the picture's and video. And to me that's the main thing. A new net book will be less than a £100 to replace.
John933