Hey Fred, Lobby for one of these

[James C. Fuller]

Fred,
  Try lobbying for this at work:
http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2425975,00.asp

James

[Frederick J. Harris]

Don't get me going James!  For the past three years I've been embroiled in a data collector war here in the Bureau of Forestry.  The two sides of the war were as follows.  On one side was me and our large field staff of foresters and field people who use the data collectors to collect field data using my various programs.  We/they wanted to continue with field hardened data coollection devices of the old school, so to speak, with a dedicated keypad for fast data entry such as the following ...

http://www.2t.com/hydrus/rugged_hydrus_luna.htm

Pitted against us was the Central Office IT staff who wanted to move to tablets.  The situation was that my/our programs would work on either Windows CE or desktop Windows, as I had recompiled the Windows CE stuff for desktop processors.  Its all just Win32 Sdk C/C++ code.   

The uneasy armistice that was finally brokered in the war is that we decided to get some of each, i.e., Panasonic ToughBooks, and 2t Hydrus Luna data recorders.  Our folks do a lot of GIS/Gps work, so the larger screen of tablets helps with this.  On the other hand, for timber management data collection, my rapid keypad entry routines honed over the course of many years beats a touchscreen all to h***.