TABLET FOR DRIVER STATION

[SenorZ]

I've used a Lenovo ThinkPad X61-T for years as a classroom computer. They are rock solid, sturdy, and have plenty of upgradeable specs. They glass on the screen is really good too. After almost 5 years of writing with the wacom pen there are hardly any scratches. The "multi-touch" screens allow for human input as well.

[MAldridge]

I've seen teams use UMPC's before with mixed results. I personally have owned many tablets over the last few years. Currently I have two tablets a Fujitsu Stylistic 1440 and a Motion Computing m1200. I regularly use the m1200 to drive at demos, but it is rather finicky because the pentium series processor in it doesn't support SSE2 optimization.

Another computer of mine I use a lot is a Panasonic Tough book, they are small, practically indestructible and have a screen that spins around and then folds flat.

One thing you should be wary of is that because tablets don't look like normal computers, field personel may give you a hard time. Also, if anything goes wrong, you really won't be able to troubleshoot because a touchscreen display isn't that easy to navigate quickly, and the parallax on a pen driven display is even harder to work with in a fast and accurate way.