Just bought an Acer Netbook for the wife.  She really likes it.  Small lite and easy to handle.  Will be great to take on trips instead of the laptop.  Battery life is 6-7 hours, plenty of time for between charges. Has 160 gig harddrive with 1 meg of memory.  Might upgrade the memory to 2 meg for $42 more.  Got it on sale at Target for $200. 

Ipad would be nice too.  Only drawback is the price and memory.  $499 gets you 16 gig of storage.  What's good about it?  Lots of app's, good book reader, build quality, instant on.  Read lots of reviews on the Ipad, it's good if it fits your needs.