Best Tools for Working on the Road
This started life as a netbook roundup, which dates it precisely: for about three years a tiny cheap laptop looked like the future of working while travelling. It was not. The category died around 2012, killed by tablets and then by laptops that got light without getting bad.
What replaced it, honestly:
- A thin full laptop if your work needs a real machine. The 13-inch class now weighs what a netbook did and runs everything, and battery life is the spec that matters on a train, not processor speed.
- A tablet with a keyboard if your work is email, documents, and reading. Lighter, better battery, and genuinely sufficient for more jobs than people admit.
- A phone and nothing else, which is what a surprising number of working travellers have converged on. It is the machine you already carry, and it does the communication half of most jobs.
The things that actually determine whether working on the road works, none of which is the computer:
- Connectivity. An eSIM bought before you land beats hunting for wifi, and hotel wifi is the least reliable part of any trip.
- Power. A single high-wattage USB-C charger that runs laptop, phone and everything else, plus the right plug adapter, replaces the bag of bricks this era needed.
- Working offline. Files synced before you go, not fetched when you need them. Trains and planes are the most productive hours available and they have the worst connections.
- Somewhere to sit. The genuine constraint is a table, a chair and two hours, which no purchase solves.
Part of the guide to gadgets and power.