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Ironically, Windows Mobile has had a pretty good Photoshop workalike for most of the past decade as Pocket Artist. On-device editing of PSDs included, along with layers, IPTC/EXIF, brushes, and so on. It's a pretty good demonstration for why there are in fact some compelling use cases for resistive screens with pinpoint accuracy stylii, despite what the capacitive screen absolutists believe.

For the record, years ago Aldus Superpaint was superior to Photoshop for several years on the Mac. It was more responsive, and supported both vector- and bitmap-based rendering.

Yeah, that's not very impressive at all. Especially since I've used Pocket Artist on my WM PDA years ago, which is probably on the level of Photoshop 4 in terms of features, and actually supports PSD files. Here's video demo. The 3-day thing doesn't help either, the same could be certainly done in Visual Studio in the same time frame, if not faster.

I was going to recommend something like this basically.

If you drop the DVD-R requirement, any PDA or smartphone should do the trick, really. I recently got an HTC S730. The slide-out keyboard is actually pretty good for emails and notes, but I could imagine it'd get old pretty fast if your writing style approaches Neal Stephenson's levels of verbosity. As the parent suggests, this could solved with a bluetooth keyboard, although I'm yet to try that. Unlike the Nokia tablet however, this thing not only is a functional GSM phone, but also looks like one too. This means less attention to yourself since phones are much more common in 3rd world countries than shiny gadgets with huge touchscreens.

Still, if I were doing something like that, I'd probably also consider something more powerful. Like maybe a TyTN II, or better yet, something with a VGA screen. It's quite a bit more expensive than an S730, but also much more capable due to the tilting* touchscreen. I still have my old Asus A600 PDA, and there are things at which it's still much better than the S730. You could write your rants in a full office environment with something like SoftMaker Office, resize and edit the photos from your camera in PocketArtist before uploading them, etc.

I hope this doesn't sound like an ad, I've actually happily used all this stuff (except for the TyTN), and while I'm not sure if this would be my final choice for a trip like that, I'd certainly think about this solution.

PS. Looking at the HTC product listing, they also have some sort of weird laptop/tablet/PDA hybrid thingie called Shift which seems pretty small and light (7", 800g).

*The tilt feature could be useful if you put the device on the table while typing on the BT keyboard.

Great selection of apps. Now all you need is a Palm EMULATOR so that they can be run on a PPC.

http://www.conduits.com/ce/apps/copilot.asp

This really does not suprise me. I was able to run Doom on my Casio Cassiopeia E-100. It ran pretty well considering that the E-100 used a 133MHz cpu. The program I used for it was "Pocket Doom"

People should be smart enough to know how to make links these days. Punish the lazy with bad karma. Here you go.

i would love to try alias sketchbook on a tablet pc, but i cant afford one. drawing with my wacom is less than perfect. i tried the demo of sketchbook, both for pc and osx, and it seemed ok, but the hand-eye thing really tripped me up. right now the best experience i have with drawing directly in an art app is with my hp ipaq 4155 and conduits pocket artist 2.7 ever think about making a version of sketchbook for pocket pcs?
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Emu48CE, an HP48 emulator.

RPN Calc. Very nice and supports RPN like all good calculators should. No graphing capability.

Maxima. Looks interesting, port of a GPL symbolic manipulation program. (This guy has emacs, gluplot, and other stuff running under CE as well.)

There's a lot more stuff out there if you search, but no real killer calculator yet that I can see.

It says it's for HPC Pro, but it works just fine on my iPAQ (StrongARM). I can connect to and control my windows and linux VNC servers.

Also, you can get a CompactFlash NIC (instead of PCMCIA) - I have one from Hawking that I picked up for about $60. Connect to the corporate LAN, surf the web, etc.

Jenova_Six

here.

PocketPC version here.

Here are Macromedia's stats on supported platforms. Which include Linux, Solaris, BeOS, IRIX, and Palm.

Also Here is someone who is making it work on CE

Technically, Palm-OS will run in emulation under Windows CE. Check out http://www.conduits.com

I haven't tried it myself but it shows the hardware discrepency between Palm-based PDAs and Windows CE-based ones.