I bought one of the original Eee 701s for about £120 when they were going out of production, and dragged it all over the UK and Europe for a few years. SSD, card slot, virtually indestructable, cheap enough it wouldn't matter if you did. Perfect travel machine...


...until you get a video camera. While it will deal with backing up files and reviewing stills, it won't even play 720p video, let alone do anything resembling editing - didn't want to do anything fancy, just cut a couple of minutes out of longer videos to post snippets online while on the road. Proper editing can be done at home.

So then I bought a 10" Archos tablet - again for about £120 in a sale. As long as you keep the screen protected with a case, the same applies as for the Eee - cheap, solid state, proper full-size USB host port to take a card reader. Plus it can deal with video (although I've still not found a decent Android video editor).

Took that to the US with me last year, and it worked pretty well. Given I tended to write a lot more than I did stuff with video, I did miss having a real keyboard. I'm currently trying to turn my notes from the trip into a proper writeup - I'm pretty sure there would be less work to do now if I'd had the Eee with me to type on as I went along.

At home I'll always use my 15" laptop for anything other than idle web browsing, again because of the keyboard. But I would be a bit edgy carrying my (relatively cheap) £500 laptop on a bike trip. If I took leave of my senses enough to pay whatever a Macbook Air costs, I'd be too scared to take it out of the house

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