Back Office
Company: Shaun Jackson Design
Price: $149.95
http://www.sjdesign.com
Steve Jobs has called this the year of the laptop. I agree, I rarely touch my G4 tower preferring my iBook owing to the addition of a wireless router. Of course once you have semi splurged on a laptop you are going to want to take it with you somewhere. You may find yourself with the urge to take it on the road, you may want to haul it to the local coffee shop, heck you might not need to take it anywhere you might just want the status of hauling around a laptop because cell phones are so passe. Whatever the reason you’re going to need something to haul said miracle of compact computing and here your choices are nearly limitless. You can use anything from a free brown paper sack to a finely crafted leather satchel costing…well if you have to ask you can’t afford it.
Most of the conveyances you’ll run across are nylon, the better ones are ballistic nylon (I don’t think that means the nylon is really pissed but I could be wrong). Your average bag is just a receptacle to carry your junk from point A to B with the tacit assumption that you won’t want to use your computer along the way and you’ll remove said computer from the bag once you arrive. Fortunately for those of you with $149.00 someone has thought, errrr, differently and designed a system you can use on your commute and one you’ll want to leave your computer in once you get to your destination.
I am speaking (naturally since the title gave it away) of the Back Office by Shaun Jackson Design.
I am blown away by this product, give me a million monkey helpers, a million years, and a million square feet of ballistic nylon and I would never have devised something this well designed. The cleverness is not in the quick conversion from backpack to briefcase (more on this later) the truly inspired bits lie elsewhere. The Shaun Jackson folks tell me it’s supposed to be a mobile office, I remain skeptical. If the Back Office really were a mobile office where’s the stale coffee and that scratchy material covering the cubicle walls? Actually, if you can live without off color water cooler jokes and putty file cabinets you can probably get by with the Back Office as a mobile office.
Where does the aforementioned cleverness begin? I suspect it starts with being designed form the ground up explicitly for laptops. For example, unclasp one buckle and the Back Office unfolds across your lap with pockets on either side. You’ll feel a little bit like a super techno latter day gun fighter. A quick pull of a zipper and you’re up and running (sure it’s a double entendre, but it’s unintentional). Once you start computing you’ll note that the bottom is stiffened to provide a nice desk like feel. You might also note that the neoprene blocks your computer is sitting on angles your computer to a very comfortable typing position (I have been told these blocks are actually there because G4 PowerBooks run so hot, I guess they’re useful on more than one level). If you’re doing anything with iMovie you can easily shove a Canon Z series in one of the pockets and you’ll have a pretty complete video editing bay right in your lap. If you’re using iPhoto most digital cameras will fit into one of the pockets, so you can retouch your photos in your very own ballistic nylon cocoon. In fact, if push came to shove, you could jam a Canon Z, an iPod and a digital camera into the pockets… heck that would put in multimedia nirvana. Back to the more mundane: you’ll notice that the zipper is placed in such a way as not to bother you while typing, a major annoyance with my current computer bag. Also deftly placed are the CD sleeves behind the screen, on my bag this is wasted space, on the Back Office you have twelve separate pockets for burnable media. The final bit of cleverness is the addition of two pieces of nylon between the bottom of the case and the aforementioned CD holding top. These super neato straps prevent the top from flopping all the way over leaving you with a really cool looking lap wherever you’re computing.
I mentioned that the Back Office converts from a backpack to a briefcase and this is a fairly neat feature. My mind turned immediately to the bike commuter while my wife pointed out that the backpack feature would be very useful when one is in an Airport where your hands are usually occupied by luggage and five-dollar pretzels. Whatever the use, the ability to go from a backpack to a briefcase is a convenient feature, still don’t make the mistake of thinking that the Back Office’s main selling point is gimmickry (you can also get a shoulder strap for ten bucks). The construction is very high quality throughout and the case is padded to provide that shiny new mini G with some extra protection. I had only one complaint about the Back Office and that had to do with the neoprene risers. The neoprene blocks Velcro into the bag securely but there is no way to semi permanently attach the neoprene feet to your laptop thus ensuring that (if your laptop is on the “It’s a Small World” side of the size range) the computer won’t slosh around while traveling.
Bottom Line: A very rugged, extremely well thought out design. I don’t think you’ll find a better way to carry your laptop. Note to Shaun Jackson Design: give the engineer behind this one a raise.
MacMice Rating: 5 out of 5
Chris Seibold
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