Travelling with technology – when is it too much?

I’m writing this post from the one of the restaurants at the Hilton New York hotel. I’m here for Affiliate Summit East 2012, having arrived yesterday from the UK. As I was about to load up my car, it crossed my mind just how much technology I would be travelling with and took a picture of my luggage.

Wait. Let me take a step back. I travel a lot – between our offices in Boston and datacenters in NYC, Atlanta, Phoenix and Dallas in the US, Amsterdam in The Netherlands and Nottingham in the UK. Add conferences and tradeshows into the mix and most of my life seems to be sat in an airport departure lounge (Amsterdam’s Schipol is the most frequented one) or an airplane seat. So I’m a well versed traveller, I travel with what I consider necessary for that trip and ‘enjoy’ whizzing through airports without my luggage being a concern. Most of the time my luggage arrives with me at my final destination unheeded but I do not want to tempt fate. Your luggage going missing, for example when you are in Warsaw for New Years and no shops are open until January 3rd, sucks.

I disgress.

The post was designed to discuss how much technology people actually travel with. What you see above is my main suitcase with a pair of jeans, smart pants, some shirts, polos and underwear/toiletries. Okay, and some hair gel. Enough to last for a 5 day trip. Along side the suitcase is my laptop messenger bag which contains my main workhorse laptop for travelling – a Lenovo T420S specc’d out to the max. Also in that bag I carry my charger, 2 spare batteries (one main battery, one ultra-bay battery), an iPad, a Kindle and an external hard drive.

In the roll-on I carry a spare laptop (11″ MacBook Air). Spare laptop? Well yes; have you ever been stuck in a country that doesn’t speak English where your main laptop fails/breaks/goes kaput? I have. And trust me, you don’t want to try and buy a laptop with a non-English keyboard. Even in Germany, they use the QWERTZ keyboard layout which is near impossible to work on if you are familiar with QWERTY. The T420s, by the way, has a British English keyboard and the Air has an American English keyboard. I use both interchangeably and other than the differing location of the ” marks, they are almost identical. But for someone unskilled at foreign languages, i.e. me, trying to use a non-English keyboard is near impossible. So two laptops it is.

I also carry a few miscellaneous accessories in the roll-on – worldwide power adaptors,phone chargers, micro/mini USB leads as well as a 2/3rds SLR digital camera – a Sony NEX-7.

Also in the mix are my cell phones. I carry both an iPhone and a Blackberry. I’ve used Blackberry since the were black and white and continue to love them for email and “phone” stuff. That means calling someone, even though iMessage/BBM seem to be the preferred communication method in this industry. For apps, nothing beats the iPhone, including all of the Androids that I have tried. Plus it means I can use one phone with a local sim and one with my regular sim and avoid 4 figure phone bills.

So lets recap. Too much technology?

• 2 x laptops (1 PC, 1 Mac)
• 2 x cell / mobile phones (1 Blackberry, 1 Apple)
• 1 x MiFi – buying a local data only sim saves you from the roaming charge pain that ANY carrier will inflict on you
• 1 x tablet – iPad
• 1 x e-reader – Kindle
• 1 x digital camera – Sony

When is enough enough? As a lover of technology, I use all of these on my trips. But it adds a new dimension to travelling light…