The amount of gadgetry that it’s possible to carry on a business trip — indeed, that’s become almost indispensable — continues to expand almost exponentially.

And as mobile phones jostle for bag space with our essential laptops, net-books, satnavs, MP3 players, portable video viewers, Bluetooth headsets, hifiheadphones, mobile scanners, cameras, camcorders, e-readers and more, the thought must have occurred to most of us at some point that this is all becoming self-defeating.

The process of miniaturisation, which began with the invention of the transistor in 1947 and seemed for decades to take us no further than radios, was supposed to reduce the size of gadgets. And so it has; but we now have so many enticing gizmos that, in terms of weight and bulk, at least, we not far off being back where we started, with gadgetry more of an encumbrance than a convenience.

This month, Jonathan Margolis looks at two items which will drastically reduce the yeti-like footprint of your mobile heap of electronics — plus one that for some, will mean the biggest bulk reduction of all, while for others will add yet another category of gadgetry that you feel compelled to put in your travel kit.

Sony Vaio X Series

Laptops have been getting progressively thinner and lighter over the years. The thinnest for the past year or two has been the near-legendary Apple MacBook Air. But now Sony have trumped the world (well, probably for a few months, at least) with the lightest and thinnest laptop ever.

The Vaio X Series is more notebook than full-on laptop, but is still a lot faster and more useful (as well as thinner and lighter) than the ubiquitous netbook computers that have invaded the market since early last year.

So how impossibly thin and light is the  
28.4cm-screen X Series? Well, depending on what spec you opt for, it can weigh as little as 655g. Even the top model weighs in at only 780g — less than many a paperback book — and with a thickness that doesn’t exceed 13.9mm.

Somehow, even that sounds thicker than this extraordinary machine is in the flesh, so to speak. It’s so thin that some may even regard it as flimsy — it actually flexes, which is scary when the price is a distinctly un-thin €1,400–€2,000.

The anorexic X Series is no slouch performance-wise, either. We’re talking a proper 1.8GHz or 2GHz Intel Atom processor (depending on model) and a hard drive of up to 250Gb.

A fully functioning laptop, then, that’s not too small to type on for long periods, but you will barely notice or feel even if you’re carrying it around all day.

3M MPro120 Pico Projector

So here’s this month’s controversial business travel gadget. The question is, does a pocket-sized projector — yes, a whole projector, like your dad used to show slides on but tiny and battery-powered — burden you down on a trip, or lighten your load?

I frequently come upon business travellers who, having had their presentations ruined by a dodgy projector at a client’s office, lug one around with them.

The 3M MPro120 ‘pico projector’, as this whole new genre of device is called, measures a ridiculous 120mm x 60mm x 24mm and weighs a risible 154g. Yet even at its brightest setting, it will work for two hours on a charge — and if your PowerPoint is any longer than that, there’s something seriously wrong with it.

The beauty of a pico projector is that come the evening, when you’re in your hotel room and realise how rubbish the movies on the hotel entertainment system are, you can also use it to project films from your laptop onto the wall or ceiling. Priced around €350; visit www.3m.com.

TomTom iPhone App

Convergence — squashing as many gadgets as possible into one box — has been the big technology theme in recent years.

And no gadget is more of an orgy of convergence than the iPhone, which, thanks to the near 90,000 software Apps now available, is capable, in theory, of being 90,000 different things at the same time, from a multi-language interpreter to a flute.

But, no App is as convergey as the new TomTom add-on, which turns your iPhone into a fully functioning car satnav.

Owners of the iconic iPhone will know that the latest version, the 3Gs, already includes a pedestrian (as in, ‘for use when walking along the street’, rather than ‘staid and boring’) satnav.

The TomTom App, however, combined with TomTom’s dedicated windscreen mounting bracket, morphs your iPhone into a proper grown-up device that will take you to your destination exactly the same as the ‘real’ thing, minus a few functions like traffic information, which very few people ever use anyway.

There’s no great price advantage — the App with UK and most of mainland Europe mapping costs €90 and the bracket €110. But you get one less gadget to carry in your bulging bag, and that can only be good.

Oh, and can you make and receive calls while your iPhone is being a TomTom? Yes, indeed you can.

SOUND MANAGEMENT

What, you have to ask yourself in these straitened times, is the real advantage of an €8,000 music server over an iPod/laptop combo that costs peanuts? After all, both come without speakers and store and play digital music and photos. Admittedly, the Meridian Sooloos sits atop a terabyte of memory, enough for 4,500 CDs, but then you can’t walk off with it in your pocket.

Bob Stuart, who founded UK-based Meridian in 1977 and bought Californian Sooloos last year following an investment by Richemont Group, explains: “The problem is of the management of music collections containing hundreds and sometimes thousands of CDs. We asked ourselves whether there was a logical way of archiving it all.”

Part of the problem is the poor quality of most MP3 formats. In fact, it was Stuart who developed the Lossless format — now an industry standard for quality. Another problem is the mangling of metadata (for example, mixing up the composer and the conductor) when you rip a CD. There is a world of difference between ripping CDs for iPod use and archiving them at maximum quality.

The Sooloos displays albums in a party-friendly, Flickr-like format and is plain fun to use, with an intuitive touch screen that Stuart claims women flock to. You can search your music collection by almost any parameters — right down to jazz from the 1950s excluding clarinets. It will swim within a genre, or just play energetic tracks when you want to humour your personal trainer. The Sooloos will also compress music for iPod download.

As for the metadata, it’s all there in archival splendour. There was no tambourine player on Dylan’s Mr Tambourine Man but — should your guests demand it — you can find out that Bruce Langhorne played electric guitar. If the party flags you can search the whole library for tracks on which Bruce Langhorne played guitar, and so on. The future lies in subscription-based, Lossless downloads from websites such as Rhapsody, which can already supply the Sooloos. The only question left is whether you value your music enough to pay this sort of premium, or whether, on reflection, the iPod/laptop combo is enough after all.

Richard Lofthouse