Digital Home Thoughts: The RoadWired Pod: The Ultimate Gear-Carrying Gadget for Geeks?

Figure 8: The "orange elastic zone"

This zone would be handy for cables, with twin orange bands on a horizontal plane. As the photo shows, I ended up putting my 56K and Ethernet CompactFlash cards here – they fit nicely. There's yet another pouch on the inside of the wing, with a Velcro flap to boot. I stored my Gomadic Sync 'n Charge cable here.


Figure 9: The business card holder and "secret pouch zone"

On the underside of the lid, they've given you a place for your business card (in case The Pod gets lost) and there's a clever hidden pouch behind it for money, credit cards and identification. This pouch is designed in such a way that, unless you know it's there, you can't readily see it. However, if you put any sort of plastic card in there, the normally flexible top becomes stiff, but only around the edges of the card. It wouldn't take a very clever thief to find this. It would be nice to see RoadWired put a polyethylene sheet in the top to add a little protection for this zone (nobody wants a bent or broken credit card).

Some Room for Improvement
All in all, I really liked The Pod. There are a few things that could use improving however:

• No room for an external flash for my digital camera. Not an issue for the average consumer, but I found myself wishing the centre compartment was about twice as wide so I could fit my Canon Speedlite 420EX flash into the case. If you don't regularly use an external flash for your digital camera, this is a moot point.
  
  
• AA batteries? 35mm film? Who uses those things any more? Give me some larger elastic loops that go horizontally rather than vertically, and I could put my extra camera battery there. The battery loops are a waste of space for me, and likely most users (unless you happen to have a digital camera that uses AA batteries, which is rare, but possible).
  
  
• In my particular case, there wasn't enough space to carry both my Canon G2 camera and the AC charger that I needed for recharging the battery. The Pod was about half an inch too short to accommodate it. Depending on the size of your camera's battery charger, this may be a frustrating limitation. Another good reason to have a spare camera battery!
  
  
• This is a very minor thing, but since these bags are designed to be as esthetically pleasing as they are practical, it irritates me that the card holder doesn't display the whole card. Unless you have a business card with huge margins, a good portion of the card will be hidden. The plastic window should show 100% of the business card.

Conclusions
The Pod is an excellent carrier for your gear, and if you're going away for a short trip, it balances the need to carry important gear with the equally pressing need to be small and easy to carry with you. The bag is almost perfect, but they need to ditch the 35mm legacy design and move forward with a new design based around modern equipment needs.