My Dream Mobile Office

This week I went with Lauren to her project in Nashville. We've been talking about bringing me out for a week since she accepted her internship with Deloitte. So we finally did it. The main reason for wanting to bring me out is to see how feasible it would be for me to do it on a regular basis being that I work from home. Well first off, working from a hotel room is not much physically different than that of working from home (except that you get the added benefit of a housekeeper). Anyways so yesterday at dinner Lauren asked me what I thought so far. My answer was 'vague', but basically I said I could easily do it, but I'd need to really upgrade my 'gadget' collection to make it more feasible. Upon that statement we started discussing how I would design my 'mobile office'.

Necessities:

1. Mobile line of communication: my Treo650 does that perfectly (not that another phone or a newer Palm wouldn't but my trusty 650 has yet to truly fail me). With iSkoot I even get my Skype calls.
2. Laptop/notebook: the lighter the better... especially today with the slew of NetBooks and the availability to work from the 'cloud' you don't need an extremely powerful notebook just one with a strong wifi (maybe evdo/edge/etc) receiver and a long battery life. My (well work's) Powerbook (and hopefully soon to be replaced with a MacBookPro) do the job just fine but that said I would be happy to work with a smaller piece of equipment.
   

Really that is all I  would really need, but again now I'm designing a mobile office so you want to be as light as possible. Being a developer and working in an 'operational' environment with tropical cyclone data, I have a slew of references I carry around. Yes the internet/google has almost anything you could want and need, but... I also have a number of tech manuals and such I refer to regularly, a number of these I have in PDF/digital formats and can carry them on my laptop or store on a web drive, but it is really hard to keep a document in screen while using Eclipse or other such editor, especially with the limited real estate on a laptop screen (even worse I'm assuming on a NetBook). Solution, an eBook reader. Since it came out I've not really liked the Kindle, but I decided to give it another look, especially with version 2 just around the corner. I think this would be the ultimate travel companion. Basically you could keep an entire reference library at a finger touch on a Kindle and never waste an inch of screen space on your laptop... heck this would even be very useful at home/office for the same purpose.

Other tools that I think may be useful, a mini wifi router (not all hotels have wireless yet, maybe Airport Express or Dlink pocket wifi router) and surge protector (preferably with USB adapter for charging devices like the one from Belkin).

So there you have it, my 'dream' mobile office:

1. Palm-based smart phone
2. lightweight notebook/laptop/netbook
3. Kindle
4. mini wifi router (preference probably would be the Airport Express since it has a built-in power source)
   
5. Belkin travel surge protector

Not bad, I think I could easily fit all this into my current bag of choice:

but then again almost anything and everything fits in this bag.