Toughbook
Left: Bruce on duty near a steel mill, displaying an aerial view of the area visible in the background; Right: Bruce vs. average O'Reilly book size. Click previews to enlarge
Martin wants to have a new notebook that he can both throw around and use in the shower and that has an integrated camera. I have such a notebook and cannot recommend it highly enough: an older Panasonic Toughbook called Bruce, fast enough to run most applications I need, small enough to carry it anywhere and ruggedized enough to operate it both inside dusty and dirty photo locations and in my bath tub where taking notes or watching movies is quite convenient. It does not have a camera, but I am not too sure about that Martin plus shower plus video camera scenario anyway. Instead, it comes with a touchscreen, which is most useful even on a non-Tablet PC operating system.
I've initially acquired Bruce in order to pull photos from my digital camera onto it while on photographic assignment. As the screen can be read even in daylight and color and gray scales qualities are quite OK, I now can also check photos for sharpness and cutout right on spot, much better than the tiny camera display would let me do. Today, I use it as my main notebook while on the road, simply because its small size (and its built in handle) makes it much more convenient to carry than standard notebooks and usable in environments where you might not want to unpack an fullsize notebook. With five hours plus battery runtime, LAN and WLAN connectivity and a touchscreen that makes mindmapping even more intuitive, I see no need to go back to a large machine for most use cases.
Roadmap: use as my personal message hub (email, instant messaging, skyping, news aggregating), migration to W2k, more RAM, larger HDD, lighthttpd HTTP server installation web server installation (lighthttpd is Linux only...), migration of my personal wiki from my home server to Bruce. Perhaps: patch integrated GSM modem antenna to WLAN PCMCIA card in order to improve radio characteristics.
