The gadgets in my road warrior backpack

I’m not the most frequent traveler but when I do travel I expect to have all the necessary gadgets at my disposal to keep living digital. And all those gadgets must fit in my road warrior medium sized backpack. Weight is not necessarily a problem as I am well built, but I don’t want to carry stones on my back either.

So let’s see what I’m packing every day and carry with me without making big compromises for functionality:

HP 6530b business laptop

1 – The Laptop: HP 6530b

I’ve bought mine for around 1200 $ in January but now you’ll find it on Amazon for around 700 – 800 $, but be careful about the hardware specs as mine comes with a very speedy Core 2 Duo P8600 CPU running at 2.4 GHz. I’ve added 2 GB of RAM on top of the already existing 2. The 14.1 inch screen is amazing compared to other HP laptops I’ve owned plus it has a higher than usual screen resolution: 1440 x 900 pixels. I’m running now Windows 7 RC1 on it, which runs speedy enough for my taste (I can’t stand sluggish computers). Battery lasts for approximately 3 hours with WiFi on and medium brightness so that’s very acceptable.

Panasonic DMC-LS80 pocket camera

2 – The digital camera: Panasonic DMC-LS80

It’s a small pocketable camera, with 8 megapixels and 3X optical zoom plus image stabilization. It was a bargain for 100 $ plus a 2 GB card and a carrying case. For power I user 4 x AA rechargeable batteries (two sets as the DMS-LS80 only needs 2 batteries) and a fast charger for them. Picture quality is not great, at least indoors, but the small weight is a very important factor plus batteries last above average. It’s also pretty resistant as I’ve dropped it a few times.

Lacie external disk

3 – External storage: Lacie 250 GB 2.5 inch drive

That’s one piece of industrial design marvel with a metallic case, I like the design very much, plus being a notebook drive you don’t need a separate charger, as the power is sent trough the USB cable. Now 250 GB is considered too low, but 18 months ago was pretty big. If you want an enternal drive I recommend Lacie (Check out Amazon’s Lacie external hard drives offers). I use mine for storage of multimedia files and backup of my work. It’s not my only backup.

Nokia E71 business smartphone

4 – The smartphone: Nokia E71

This is my latest aquisition (besides the BenQ 22 inch Full HD desktop montor). It’s by far the best QWERTY Nokia business phone sold today and for good reasons: it’s small, fast, has many multimedia and business features, it’s stable plus you can find any piece of software you can imagine for Symbian. And I don’t have to mention the battery that lasts 4 days of intensive use (I’ve write some blog articles on it) or 6-7 days with lighter use. You’ll have to pay around 500 $ unlocked, but I’ll bet it’s cheaper with a monthly plan. All I can say is I love it.

5 – Other small things

There are also some small stuff I carry arround with me every time like:

• pens and paper
• screwdriver
• chargers for mobile phone, bluetooth stereo headset
• microUSB and miniUSB cable
• USB sticks
• bussiness cards

How about you, what’s your road warrior ‘standard box’?