Tactical Advice

In The Bag

Check out 10 portable tech gadgets that let you take the office with you.
This story appears in the September 2009 issue of BizTech Magazine.

If you’re a mobile IT exec — and frankly, who in IT isn’t on the go? — what you can carry in your bag often must add up to a portable office of sorts. So what tech goodies and gadgets should make the cut? Here are 10 cool and weight-worthy items to consider toting along (that come in just under 10 pounds in total weight).

1. Bag: Start off with a bag that can stow your tech ware securely but also provide you easy access. The Targus TTL500 is designed with the road warrior in mind: It has an extra padded compartment for a second notebook, a projector or even a camera.

2. Notebook: You can go super small with a netbook or a mini, such as the HP Mini 2140, which weighs 2.6 pounds but has 2GB of RAM and runs a full Windows Office suite.

3. Smartphone: The BlackBerry Bold can do triple duty — as a phone, mail minder and officemate; Word-, PowerPoint- and Excel-compatible apps allow viewing and editing of Office files.

4. Flash drive: To tote files securely and on your person, check out the IronKey Enterprise USB drive; it has FIPS 140-2 Level 2 validation.

5. Keyboard: If you spend a lot of time typing, then a portable keyboard is not a luxury. The Unotron FlexiTuff FT10 can stand up to spills: Rinse it, dry it and roll it up. 6. Mouse: The Iogear Phaser 3-in-1 GME422RW6, a wireless mouse and presenter, works up to 30 feet from a notebook (and even has a laser pointer).

7. Cooling pad: Avoid scorched thighs (silently) with a fanless Thermaltake iXoft R15ON01 notebook pad.

8. Projector: At less than 2 pounds and small enough to fit in your palm, the Samsung P400 is a projector that you actually can toss in your bag.

9. Scanner: The Visioneer Roadwarrior scanner weighs in at 10.6 ounces, scans 36-bit color and can be powered by a USB port.

10. Headset: Create your own environment anywhere by blocking out surrounding noise with the Sennheiser MM 200 Bluetooth stereo in-ear headset. So get out of the office — what are you waiting for?

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