Any time a Web site or article tells me there are 25 “gotta haves” of anything — in this case, travel gadgets — I get very nervous. If I “gotta have” 25 new travel gadgets (or maybe even 15, assuming I’m cool enough that I already have 10 of them), where the heck am I going to put ‘em all?
I already have a very fat briefcase (i.e., “personal item” for TSA purposes) and one carry-on bag, which can be fairly thin if it’s a short trip or stuffed to the gills if I’m going out for a week or longer. Even so, Time magazine tells me I “gotta have” these 25 gadgets.
The list is pretty Apple-centric. Three of the first six are Apple devices. (Steve Jobs must be proud.) And I haven’t been able to get all the way through it because the list has crashed my browser three times. But more than a few of the gadgets are not “gotta have” in my book — er, briefcase — because they’re superfluous.
Who needs a DVD player, after all, if you already have a laptop with a DVD drive?
Ditto a separate video game device. (They recommend a Sony PlayStation Portable.) Load some games on your laptop and off you go.
And who needs two GPS devices? Are two laptops better than one? (They recommend both the Mac Airbook and an HP Elitebook.) Don’t know about the Time guys, but if I’m a Mac-boy (or girl), I’ll bring my Mac and hang the PC, thank-you-very-much. And if I’m a PC-boy, I may or may not have a case of Mac-envy but I sure don’t want to carry both. (For the record, it’s PCs for me.)
So overall, this is not a case of 25 “gotta haves.” It is a case of “25 items we want to publish on a list so we can draw more traffic and make more advertisers happy.” I’m OK with that — we publish advertising at Tripso, too, and my income ultimately comes from advertising so I love making advertisers happy — but why not be honest about the list?
Oh, and the $595 (list price) “gotta have” Tumi bag? Looks darned good to me, but as a road warrior I used to buy really expensive bags (not Tumi, I’ll confess, but the point’s the same) and found that they wore out after a while, just like the not-so-expensive bags.
Now I buy a cheap roll-on bag at a local flea market or discount store. Guess what? It lasts me about as long as the expensive bags used to. At about one-tenth the price. When it breaks after a year or 18 months, I throw it away and buy a new one. The other way, I’d ship it back – it was always under warranty – and they’d send me a new one, eventually. But that got real old after about the fifth time.
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re: “Oh, and the $595 (list price) “gotta have” Tumi bag? Looks darned good to me, but as a road warrior I used to buy really expensive bags (not Tumi, I’ll confess, but the point’s the same) and found that they wore out after a while, just like the not-so-expensive bags.”
After 25 years of global travel experience i buy my luggage at Costco. Usually it is made by TravelPro except much less expensive and with a lifetime guarantee. Can’t be beat.