Any recommendations?  I want to stay around $300.  I want to keep it in my go bag so I can Skype the wife and surf Arfcom when I get stuck somewhere overnight.

I have the Acer Aspire One. Nice unit, no disc drive though.
Many others have the Asus. They're similar.
Go to the Urban Commando forum in the General section.
They've been written up to death.

Acers seem to be nice , however i'm going for a dell with my netbook build (Solar powered netbook with 20+ hrs of battery time :)

Dealnews.com usually has places to find netbooks for a good price.

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Asus 1000HE

This.   I have the 1000H and wish I had the 1000HE, it has a better keyboard and even higher battery life, 8 hour range i believe.   A friend of mine went out and bought an acer after he saw my ASUS and now wishes he had the ASUS.  The ASUS and Acer have almost identical performance depending on model but the ASUS wins in quality, looks and battery performance hands down.  Also stick with a 10" screen, 9" really is too small.

^^ That's the one I have as well.  I love it.  The CPU is slightly faster than the other Asus units and it's very easy to upgrade to 2 GB RAM.  

PS the battery lasts around 5 hours with normal usage.  Don't believe the mfr's battery ratings, cut them by 25% and you might get a reasonable estimate of how long they will last under normal usage.

+1

While that may be true with normal usage, I consistently get 6+ hours out of my 1000H.  You just have to be conservative.  That is 6+ hours surfing the web with some video.  You just have to keep it in power save mode  (which changes the clock speed of the processor) and keep the brightness at the lowest level you can comfortably use it  at, for me that is one click away from the lowest lvl.  Also make sure bluetooth is off if you are not using it.  If i turn off the wireless card as well, which you can do at the push of a button, I have stretched it even a bit further just doing things like word processing and excel.  But if you watch a lot of video and keep the processor speed up higher, yeah you can excpect 4-5 hours.  But still, try doing that on a full sized laptop.

http://www.newegg.com/Special/ShellShocker.aspx