One of the great things about working for my current employer is that they provide me with the devices I need for mobile working and we use all of the software that we are helping our customers to adopt. My tools are a Microsoft Surface Pro 3 tablet and a Nokia Lumia 830 smartphone, together with the latest released versions of Windows and Office and I consume services from the Microsoft Cloud including all of the Office 365 workloads as well as some on-premises apps like Skype for Business. Using the full Microsoft stack does mean I’ve had to go back to using Internet Exploder though… and I am at last getting used to Bing and weening myself of the habit of using the big G for search – at least on my work PC!
I’m not saying that the use of a Surface Pro 3 was the reason I took the job – but it may have been a factor and not lugging around a heavy laptop has some major advantages (even the small form factor laptop I used for my last job was pretty weighty).
Unfortunately, with such a svelte device comes a down-side… namely that I now carry a plethora of cables and adapters, as illustrated by my former colleague Dom Allen (who now works for a rival Microsoft Partner):
https://instagram.com/p/0sxOw9jjTK/
So, what’s in my bag these days alongside the Surface Pro and its charger?
- A Microsoft Arc Touch Bluetooth Mouse.
- Spare AAAA batteries for the Surface Pen.
- A 3-port USB 3.0 Hub with RJ45 10/100/1000 Gigabit Ethernet LAN.
- A Mini DisplayPort male to HDMI female adapter.
- A Mini-DisplayPort male to VGA female adapter.
- A couple of micro-USB cables.
- A Kuando BusyLight.
- and a Bluetooth headset.
Maybe not quite the portable computing panacea I might have hoped for… but at least they all fit inside a pencil case!
(Unrelated to work, I also carry a 10cm Apple Certified Lightning to USB cable and an Anker Astro E1 5200mAh external battery power bank to keep my iPhone alive all day…)
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