I've owned the Excalibur Touch-Chess model. The touch screen is great, it has a lot of built-in options, but I guess I'd have to say that the display is poor. There is no backlight, just a contrast knob. The chess-set is also poorly designed. The pieces are created by stacking a new shape on top of an existing one. For example, the common base of all pieces and pawns is the triangle, and there appear blips over the tops of some of the pieces to tell them apart from the others: a bishop has one blip, a queen has two. Now the pawns don't have any blips above them, but if your display contrast knob is a bit loose, then you'll always see the faint shadows of blips.

You can see what I'm describing by clicking on the Touch-Chess game to enlarged its image. Look at the Box. There you can see the blips in the shapes representing bishop and queen. (The photo that links to the mephisto game also looks like a stacked chesset.) I think after a few drinks on a plane, you don't want to figure out what the blips represent. What you want is a shape that represents its chesspiece.

That's what I see in Excalibur's New York Times Chess computer: a rook that looks like a castle, and a knight that looks like a horse. That's nice. It comes with a backlight, which may be a necessity for overnight air-travel. It's also stronger than the other handhelds at 2000+. Finally, it looks like a PDA, so you'll look professional, hard at work, while you're tinkering around on the plane.