I have an HP NC4010. I think they've been discontinued recently but are, at a quick Google, still available from some of the online retailers. As such, there may be a bargain to be had.
It truly is ultraportable. 12.1" TFT, 1.6Kg, 1.5GHz (or 1.6, I forget) Pentium-M, ATI Radeon graphics, almost silent once the fan's done its startup run-up and even then you need to be somewhere almost completely silent to hear it, built like an outside dunnie - you could sling it in your case loose and I doubt any harm would come to the screen as it's got an incredibly stiff outer casing, 512Mb RAM, Bluetooth, WLAN, er.... SD/MMC card reader, Infrared... all you could want really.
One thing. There's no internal optical drive bay. It's just too small. So you'd need a seperate caddy and drive. The HP one draws its power using a special USB lead which connects to an extra pin alongside one of the USB ports. That's the only compromise but if you rarely need an optical drive, no big issue. Even if you do, the caddy in itself is tiny. Hardly bigger than the bare slim drive and with no power supply to tote around. Hardly an inconvenience for the benefit of such a portable laptop.
It's still big enough to be used and typed on like proper laptop though. Absolutely no compromise there. Recommended.
Budget wise, the one I bought was the very top spec', although strangely not fitted with the fastest processor (they went up to 1.8GHz I think which wasn't available on the 'bells and whistles' model for some reason) of the range. It cost about £1500 inc. VAT.
I imagine that a similar or slightly lower spec' one would be well within your budget given some haggling over its discontinued status.
Worth a look for its sheer toughness alone. Portable means knocks. Mine's taken plenty and still looks and works as new.