I once wrote a game while trapped on the Shinkansen from Nagoya to Tokyo. I was trying to get around the typhoon that had grounded my Centrair flight, but ended up running straight into it. We were stopped between stations for a few hours as the typhoon steadily drew closer, and eventually we were forced to turn around. Fortunately, there were plug outlets on the train.
Fun! I'm with you on battery life and utility trumping all else. I used to code on layovers and in meetings on my Palm Pilot with Quartus Forth[1], and sometimes a little Basic environment with a Dialog builder. The name of that tool escapes me. Thank you for reminding me of OpenPandora[2]. I may have to pick one up or maybe wait for the Pyra[3].
The Pandora, especially when you assemble it yourself is nicely priced now. For me it's fine. Secretively i'm waiting for a Zaurus like clamshell casing in which I can click the S5 for instance. It would have room for a keyboard (or game pads if you like that) and extra battery to make the base heavier so it wouldn't fall over and deliver 4x as much battery life. Can someone kickstart please?
Edit: Thanks for that Quartus Forth. Shame I missed that back in the day. Luckily I have a few working Palms here.
I have similar goals of coding on the go. I used to use the method of carrying an extra battery, but now I use a chromebook running linux for my portable coding. It has great battery life (~10 hours, though battery not replaceable) and is quite small (I use the HP Chromebook 14).
My issue tends to be the lack of internet. When I'm going on a trip and have a project in mind, I try to make sure my dev environment is ready and download all relevant code/framework references for offline viewing using wget.
I can relate. I did fair amount of coding on Openmoko Neo Freerunner, Qi Hardware's Ben Nanonote and Nokia N900 in my life :) Mostly in Python or Bash, but occasionally in some other languages as well.
