My mum just went on a tour of SE Asia, before she left we got her a little 12" netbook, just an Atom-based thingy with 1gb of ram, inbuilt card reader, a few usb ports, and not much else. brang an external hard disk, it worked great, also to check emails and such on the road from hotel-wifi.

I know Apple crippled their ipad and left off the USB ports, but how about the Samsung Galaxy tablets? afaik they all still have USB ports and work perfectly well enough for transferring from card to portable hdd...