Handheld Programming?

Posted by Cliff on Wednesday March 19, 2003 @10:20AM from the taking-your-IDE-with-you dept.

dutky asks: "What devices does Slashdot recommend for the programmer on the go? Recently I went on vacation to Vietnam. Before we left my wife asked what I would do if I couldn't program for a month. I tried to assemble an inexpensive and portable programming environment using a Palm 130, but it was less than satisfactory. With the recent article on the Zarus PDA I have gotten to thinking about the problem again. Notably, I -don't- need a whopping amount of RAM, disk space, or processor speed, and I can live with fairly modest screen sizes. I was unable to find anything that matched all these criteria in about two weeks of occasional (and hurried) research. Do any such beasts exist?"

"My requirements are pretty simple:

Small and durable (I was packing three and a half weeks of clothes and stuff in a moderately large backpack)
Long battery life (able to get in a good 8-hour programming session without interruption)
Able to use a keyboard (I can't write C code from Grafitti)
Reasonable screen resolution (I need to be able to see at least 80 columns by 40 lines)
Ability to run a wide variety of programming tools (at least a good editor, C compiler, and probably several common scripting languages as well)
External mass storage of some kind (I'd settle for SD or CF cards)
Relatively inexpensive: $200-$400 is a good range (I don't want to be too upset if it gets lost, stolen or dropped off of a cliff)"

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