An office away from the office

By PETER GRIFFIN

It's early afternoon in Shanghai and the Chinese industrialists thumbing your business plan are getting impatient. They want more details, numbers, projections - and they want them now. You know the sun is going down back at the office in Auckland and most of the crew have probably slipped out to the pub since the boss is out of town.

In the ideal business traveller's world you would politely ask your Chinese guests to direct you to the nearest phone jack, you would dial into the company network through a global internet provider and, bingo, download the appropriate files, impressing the hell out of your prospective business partners in the process.

You don't want to weight yourself down with expensive gadgets that complicate your life and the business you're trying to carry out. No matter how many new devices come on the market, the business traveller generally clings on to just two - a laptop and a mobile phone.

In the laptop world there is now a tremendous variety - from the stylish Apple iBook to the Dell Latitude to the speedy Toshiba Portege.

Making a choice comes down to personal preference. Titanium case? Or will black plastic do, sir?

Really important company chiefs often invest in "sub-notebooks", cut-down laptops that have smaller screens and keyboards but nearly the same computing power as their bigger cousins. Sony excels in this area with its Vaio sub-notebooks.

These days the laptop even doubles as a recreation tool to occupy the plane trip home after those fruitless talks with Silicon Valley venture capitalists. You can transfer your CD collection to your laptop, converting them to mp3 files. Simply play them back using basic software, such Windows Media Player or RealPlayer.

Computer safely stowed in the overhead locker, the other thing to worry about is connectivity - or the lack of it. Your laptop is only really useful if you can connect to the internet on your travels to pick up email, check Nasdaq quotes and access the company network.

Fortunately a number of global internet providers now make this easy. A company such as iPass (www.ipass.com) ties together a vast number of internet service providers (ISPs) and phone companies to offer a global dial-up internet service. You can even order global broadband in most major cities. Local internet provider Iprolink for example, is a member of GRIC, which operates a similar service.

Wherever you are in the world you just enter the local dial-up number of the nearest GRIC internet provider (there are 270 worldwide) and you're away surfing for $9.95 an hour plus local call charges.

Those just relying on email access away from the office can discard the laptop in favour of a PDA (personal digital assistant). Hewlett Packard, Toshiba and Palm make popular models with all sorts of add-ons.

In Europe the US and now Australia, business travellers in their masses swear by the device known as Blackberry (www.blackberry.com), a funky little phone and PDA combi that operates on the GPRS network - no dialling up, if you've got new mail it just appears in your inbox.

The big caveat is that New Zealand's two mobile network providers, Telecom and Vodafone, have different network technologies that work in different parts of the world. And data roaming is patchy at best - check the websites of the operators to see what they can offer and where. But keep the phone for voice calls only.