In last few days I traveled from Ostrava to Obertraun (Austria) and
back. By train, of course. One way was about 6 hours (plus time for
train changes) so it was a good opportunity to use my GPD Pocket mini
laptop. Of course I used the GPD only during the boring parts of
journey (the Alps in Austria are great so 2 from these 4 hours I spent
by looking from the window).
There were trains which had no WiFi - the IC trains on the line
Warzsava- Wien. On way to Wien there were power outlets (230V under
every seat) and nice tables but in the opposite direction there was
nothing. The same was in the Salzkamergut Express from Wien to
Obertraun). This Express has also extremely uncomfortable seats, by the
way. This Express is often used by Chinese tourists so it is a bit
surprising that the hospitable Austrians have decided to torture their
guests in this way...
The rest was superb: the local R/Rex trains had WiFi and the same was
on the line from Attnang-Puchheim to Wien (there were modern RailJet
trains). Every seat in all these trains has table big enough for my
GPD. But the local trains were going through Alps so there was no time
to use the computer ;-)
I must say that when there was WiFi then it worked very well. This time
I have to say that services of the Austrian railways were almost
excellent (sans the Salzkamergut Express experience).
If you are interested about my experience with the GPD Pocket: I have
had to learn how to effectively used some displaced characters and some
symbols which are on the Czech keyboard map. And the rest is not
special - it is a normal Ubuntu PC with all of its pluses and minuses.
It's only unusually light and small. It is good when one needs to
transport it but it means than some support is needed if one wants to
use it as a lap-top device (in the case when there is no table
available in the train).
The time is probably not a problem. I newer traveled for so long but it
seems that 8 hours of work are possible (and probably more than 12
hours without WiFi).
The most power hungry application seems to be the Firefox (especially
on pages with tons of Javascipt code like the Ebay is). It is also
noticeable by constantly running fan - it runs on high speed which is
relatively loud (it is almost unnoticeable inside train). When Firefox
renders simpler pages or when run anything but Firefox then the fan is
unnoticeable.
This month I'm going to travel by train both to Prague and to East
Slovakia so I will see how they will be.