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As things hot up in mobile phone and PDA integration, new opportunities arise for mobile working.
If you do not wish to permanently carry around a laptop, the Sony Ericsson P800 may offer a useful alternative.
Despite its diminutive 117 x 59 x 27 mm, equivalent to many mid size phones, the P800 offers a tri-band GSM phone and a full Symbian OS 7.0 with UIQ stylus-based graphical user interface PDA with a crisp 208 x 320 pixel 4,096 colour display.
OK so its not a 21" monitor but should you need to access 2D drawing files remotely, the third party VISIARC System is available.
This provides immediate secure encrypted mobile access and viewing of drawings via a server-side drawing archive, the 'Interaction Server' held corporately or as a subscription based hosted portal service.
AutoCAD DWF, Microstation SVF, HP-GL/PLT (generic plot format) and Continuous Acquisition and Lifecycle Support CALS general open raster format files are supported and are surprisingly usable with simple zoom and scroll commands.
The viewer saves the latest downloads locally to ensure that drawing details can be viewed where there is no network coverage and there is a built-in function for wireless syncing when a connection is established to the server to ensure the latest revisions are being viewed.
This integration of local functionality and data with remote access is also exploited by a number of other applications for the P800.
These include Traffic-i that uses the well established Traffic Master service for live hold-up information.
There is also the Wayfinder service that combines a remote Global Positioning receiver that communicates with the P800 via Bluetooth with access to the Wayfinder servers via GPRS to download route plan maps plus verbal and icon instructions.