so, there's probably no perfect solution?
and as we all have different definitions of what is absolutely essential and what would be nice then we are probably all going to come up with a different answer.

All that said, here's my thoughts on the latest christmas present bought for my lovely lady . . . .. . .

We usually use 1 of 2 laptops we carry, we keep all data backed up onto usb hard drives and we have a PDA style 'phone that acts as an excellent GPS unit running the best option depending on country; TomTom, Garmin, OziExplorer, etc. All this works fine and is no problem while we are travelling in our 4x4.

However, we are planning an extensive hiking and camping trip this spring and so needed to scale down.

I wanted something lightweight, excellent battery life but cheap enough to not be too upset if it died for whatever reason.
The lovely lady wanted an e-book reader - coz she likes to read alot and books are heavy!

The solution was Amazons kindle.

We've only had the thing a few weeks so far but I am more and more impressed the more i realise what it can do.

It is VERY compact but still has a resolution that's more than acceptable, you can create 'offline' map pages and routes or whatever info and save that as a pdf (on your pc) and then these pdfs are more than acceptable on the kindle, i have been impressed at how visual even a black and white version of google earth image is.
You can access the internet, only one page at a time which can be restrictive but it's perfectly adequate for essential browsing and even memory demanding pages just as google maps will run ok.
There is a way to utilise google maps and it acts as a gps unit, haven't worked that out yet and not sure then how good the battery would be (currently the battery last between 3 and 4 WEEKS!!!).

so, you can read, you can have your guidebooks, you can load anything that can be made into a pdf, you can surf internet.

BUT, and for us this has been the nicest surprise . . . . .
There is no sim card, consequently no 'contract' in fact no charges whatsoever for accessing internet via GPRS and/or 3G.
Connection is fast enough to surf as we drive.

So for a little over £100 you get an incredible amount of book storage (we have over 400 books on ours now), you get completely free internet access worldwide (ok subject to the phone companies having an agreement with amazon). Excellent battery life. and no heavy/expensive gadget to carry!

down points?
well yes of course there . . . . . . . .
it's not colour.
it's not a computer.
no camera.
the keyboard is cumbersome.
it's not a phone.

but for the price we're more than happy.
I think if you want a navigation unit to rely on then you need to consider a garmin type product. But, for a reference if i get lost style then this would do (hope so coz we're going middle of nowhere in 2 months time!)
for storage of things like photos etc then you'd still need to consider a seperate USB hard drive and move photos from your cameras SD card to hard drive there are some units that have this feature built in or you wait until you hit the next town with a computer.

that's my thoughts.

phil.