[gummadi]

One of my friend always take his personal laptop to the onsite interviews and asks the interviewer permission to type code on his IDE for whiteboard exercises. He didn't have a problem and infact most of them are more than happy to allow him to do so.

[azov]

Not sure it's a good idea. Remember why your interviewer is asking those questions? So that he can compare candidates. You're making his job a bit harder because you now have advantage over people who did it on a whiteboard.

[eru]

The other candidates could have asked as well.

When on the job, there's no such thing as cheating [1], so I'd like to see any prospective employy act as pro-active as that. (And if I really need comparability, I'd thank the candidate for their good idea, but explain why we are going with the whiteboard instead.)

[1] Modulo conforming to laws and ethics.