Hotels and inns have courted travelers for centuries by promising all the comforts of home. Actually, I'm happy to forego those comforts—the cat walking on the bed, cold cereal for breakfast—in favor of getting all the productivity of home. That raises this week's question: Is it possible to replicate your home office when you're away?
Not surprisingly, the answer is, it depends. If your home office PC is a fire-breathing workstation with 8 TB of storage and four 27-inch monitors, teamed with a laser multifunction printer with twin 550-sheet paper trays, you might as well stay home. But if you make do with a more modest hardware setup, you may be pleasantly surprised by what's possible to accomplish from a hotel room desk, a client's office, or the front seat of your car (parked, of course).
First, you'll need a laptop—some of you may be tempted by a tablet with a folding keyboard cover, especially a model with cellular connectivity such as the Apple iPad Air 2 (or the HP Spectre x2 I reviewed for Computer Shopper), but notebooks' bang-for-the-buck quotient is considerably higher.
Real laptops have Intel Core instead of Pentium, Celeron, or Atom CPUs, and 1,920 by 1,080 or higher resolution displays instead of lowly 1,366 by 768 (we will grandfather-clause the 13-inch Apple MacBook Air 13-Inch, though we wouldn't accept its 1,440 by 900 resolution on a new laptop today). Don't settle for less than 4 GB of memory, preferably 8 GB if you do any multitasking; 128 GB of flash storage is a little thin compared to 256 GB, but (a) tolerable with cloud storage so readily available and (b) worth it for the sake of getting solid-state storage rather than slower hard drive storage.
Two Screens to Go
If your laptop lacks high resolution, consider hitting the road with a monitor in your briefcase. This way, you can work on two screens in your hotel room or give a presentation without inviting your audience to look over your shoulder. Yes, I said that not everyone needs two or more monitors in a previous column but I also said your number of pixels—with a 1080px minimum—was more important than your number of panels.
If your laptop lacks high resolution, consider hitting the road with a monitor in your briefcase. This way, you can work on two screens in your hotel room or give a presentation without inviting your audience to look over your shoulder. Yes, I said that not everyone needs two or more monitors in a previous column but I also said your number of pixels—with a 1080px minimum—was more important than your number of panels.
If you don't think a monitor will fit in your briefcase, then you have never seen a USB monitor. The Asus MB169B+, for example, is a 15.6-inch In-Plane Switching (IPS) display that weighs just 1.8 pounds, and uses a single USB 3.0 cable for both power and video data. Though not as bright as your desktop monitor (200 nits), the full HD panel is perfectly adequate for indoor use. Its carrying case doubles as a stand that holds the display in either landscape or portrait orientation. And it sells for under $200 online.
Next, you'll need Internet access. Since you're boldly going where no Wi-Fi hotspot has gone before, that means mobile broadband or that cellular connectivity I mentioned earlier. Yes, real hotels have free Wi-Fi but we all know that many are greedy for those $15-a-day fees and, when you're visiting a client's office, it can be awkward to ask for the Wi-Fi password.
Better to bring the Web with you in the form of the Verizon Jetpack 4G LTE Mobile Hotspot AC791L, which costs $50 with a two-year contract plus $50 per month for 4 GB of data. This shirt pocket-sized Internet gateway works for more than 20 hours on a charge (it can also charge your smartphone in a pinch), connecting your laptop, phone, tablet, camera—up to 15 devices—to the Web.
The Paper Chase
What if you need hard copy on the highway? For most of us, that means trotting down to the hotel's business center with a document on a flash drive. But if you need portable printing—making handouts for a presentation, say, or flyers for a realty open house—you should check out the Epson WorkForce WF-100, a 3.5-pound inkjet about the size of a box of Kleenex that chugs along, printing surprisingly crisp documents and borderless photos, on either AC or battery power (albeit at half speed on the latter). The $200 Epson has Wi-Fi Direct for making connections when you're away from your wireless network.
What if you need hard copy on the highway? For most of us, that means trotting down to the hotel's business center with a document on a flash drive. But if you need portable printing—making handouts for a presentation, say, or flyers for a realty open house—you should check out the Epson WorkForce WF-100
If you're seeking a mobile equivalent to what I've called the hub of a home office, a multifunction printer/copier/scanner, there's the HP Officejet 150 Mobile All-in-One, but that Bluetooth-based device is substantially bulkier and costs more than the WF-100. I'd suggest you look at Fujitsu's 0 .9-pound ScanSnap iX100 or another portable scanner instead.
Even on the road, of course, you can't do without backup. I use a mix of cloud and pocket storage, uploading files to OneDrive (I have 1 TB of space as an Office 365 Home subscriber) and, since I have an Android phone, carrying SanDisk's 64 GB Ultra Dual USB Drive 3.0, which has a USB 3.0 plug on one end and a Micro USB plug on the other.
Finally, if you use your laptop on a plane or train, you may be irritated—and, at worst, your business may be endangered—by a nosy seatmate reading what's on your screen. One row behind and across the aisle is the ideal vantage point for snooping, by the way. A privacy and screen protector
such as those offered by 3M can thwart prying eyes while you're on the go.