I took a Brunton roll up panel on my year tour and never used it. I gave it away in Almaty to a bike mechanic who helped me out (along with rechargeable batteries and stuff). Nice piece of gear.
I did use a recharge device which used 4 AA batteries to charge up my PDA. 4 alkaline AA's gave me about 1.5 PDA charges, 4Nicad chargeable AA's gave me ~0.8 recharges to my PDA. 4 Lithium AA's gave a lot more recharges (2 or more).
The reason I didn't need to use the solar panel was because my power consumption was minimal. My camera (Canon S2IS) used 4 AA's, and using lithiums-I think I only needed one swap out up to where I gave the Solar away. I had a portable hard drive (hyperdrive) which used 4 AA's, and I took them out after I backed up. My PDA worked hours off of a charge, plenty for my journal needs. I didn't use my PDA online (except once).
-In summary, I would recommend solar (especialy flexible solar-like Brunton), to folks whose power consumption off grid would justify the weight & cost. ie-Folks who upload journals/blogs off of grid power, profesional or "semi" professional photographers. Basicly-folks who use a laptop off grid power.
EDIT-Adding:
I've heard of newer laptop computers with solid state hard drives, and ?6/8hours user time per charge. This would be an awesome computer to use due to lower risk of hard drive failure from vibration/altitude. Longer run time is a nice bonus-ie would only need to fully recharge every 3 days if using 2hrs per day.
Last edited by Camel; 08-16-08 at 11:42 AM.