Advice Request - Portable Computing

Greylor

Greetings folks!

I am seeking some advice on what type of portable computing device to buy for work.

I work in administration for a private hospital, and spend most of my time doing purchasing (anything from medical consumables to furniture to TVs to gardening gear). I do a bit of everything though.

As such, I spend a lot of time on the move around the hospital, and have a huge number of things to keep track of at the same time (some short-term things, as well as multiple long-term projects), while needing to have as much information as possible available on me at all times (e.g. it would be nice to have supplier catalogues available on-the-fly, as well as access to item prices, e-mail, hospital standards, all my spreadsheets etc.).

As a consequance of all of that, I burn through notepads at a rediculous speed...and all that notepads do is create a mess of small pages with a million and six things on them. It's chaotic and doesn't do what I need.

So what I am looking for is a portable computing device that will:
- Have a decent sized screen (like tablet PC sized)
- Allow me to easily create and edit Word and Excel Documents on-the-fly
- Have a good keyboard (doens't matter if it is touchscreen or not..as long as I don't have to do something silly like go into a seperate menu in order to find the comma or apostraphy, and it is close enough to a normal qwert keyboard setup to be comfortable. It would be pointless if typing on this device turned out to be slower than writing).
- Good connectivity (3G, Wifi, network capable etc.)
- Highly portable (laptops are too bulky)
- Easy zoom feature (I like the 2-finger zoom ability of the tablet PCs...would be handy when viewing PDFs and catalogues. Not a necessity, but is kewl).
- High Durability (it will be moved around a lot, and get the occasional bump)

I think you get the idea.

My own research has narrowed it down to tablet PCs, like the iPad2, or netbooks. Unfortunately neither is perfect.

Are those my only two options, or is there some other device that I am forgetting?

If those are, in fact, my only two options, are any of you in similar circumstances to me? If so, what are your experiences and what would you recommend?

look up asus transformer.
first version should do the job for you. there is also a second version called prime that is more powerful.
version with 3g is not out yet but soon apparently.

otherwise I'd recommend ipad2 3g. you can buy an additional keyboard for ipad if needed for long docs. otherwise get some handwriting recognition app and stylus.