I've had the Canon Powershot A1 for several years, and it's been great. It's similar to the A70. It's definitely heavier and more solidly built than the Kodak DC240 that broke on me thru normal use.
Also, I bought the 1 GB IBM Microdrive. It's an enormous amount of space for a digital camera.
My Sharp laptop has a slot for the compact flash and it shows up as another drive on Win/XP. It's fast to copy files from there.