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I want to see a portable device made specifically for serious writers.

Laptops mostly don't cut it because most of them are too heavy, too general purpose, or have horrible keyboards/tiny keyboards because so much space is wasted by the touchpad. And frankly, an OS like Windows is overkill and rather cumbersome when all I want is a glorified portable typewriter (why do I need to wait a good half minute AT LEAST for XP/OS X to boot if I just want to do some writing?)

PDAs don't cut it either. The lack of keyboard on most of them (or keyboards that require a magnifying glass to see the keys) makes them useless to me, and then there's the tiny displays.

This hypothetical device would ideally use the laptop form factor, but be a fair bit lighter than most laptops and with the low hardware requirements for what it would be doing (a 100Mhz CPU can handle word processing just fine), I don't see any reason for it to be over 2lbs. It would need a good keyboard - in other words, not a typical laptop keyboard and not one of those horribly mushy-feeling "quiet" keyboard (I want good tactile feedback from my keyboard, not to feel like I'm typing on a sponge).

It would, of course, also need a good word processor/text editor app. I'm inclined to lean towards text editor because I've found they're typically a lot more flexible/powerful when it comes to the actual maniuplation of text (as opposed to making it look "pretty"). For the most part, writers don't need something as heavy as Word - at least, speaking from the perspective of someone who spent 3 years writing online content primarily in EditPlus (and later Pe in BeOS). Well thought-out keyboard shortcuts are a must as well. Personally, I'd be happy with something like JOE.

Make it light, with good battery life and a decent display, at a decent price (I don't think $200-300 is unreasonably low, considering that something grossly underpowered even by PDA standards would be fast enough for this kind of work). On top of that, a device like the one I'm describing should also be instant-on or as close as possible. If those criteria were met, I bet it would be snatched up by journalists and other professional writers, along with students who just want to type up that essay in his/her favourite coffee shop without having to shell out for a full-fledged laptop.

The annoying thing is that laptops like this were being made at one point (I remember my dad having one that closely fit my description back in the days when modem == acoustic cups you put over the mouth/earpiece of the phone). My current stopgap solution is an old Thinkpad 560x that runs BeOS, but that's still not quite ideal.