By Bryan Eley (breley), Reviewer
May 31, 2007

Vendor: Proporta (www.proporta.com)
Price: US$ 47.95 (Ex. VAT : € 31.45)

Rating (out of 100) 82
Very Good—Recommended

Quality/Construction          17/20
Design and Functionality    16/20
Assessment of Protection  15/20
Real-life Performance         17/20
Cost/Value Assessment    17/20

When I received my package from Chris Leckness, I was left holding the bag.  Ordinarily that would be a bad thing, but in my hands was the Proporta Gadget Bag.  Behold!  A means to bring order to my mobile and peripheral chaos.  PDA, keyboard, GPS receiver, cables, memory cards, might now have a centralized place to rest.

Asssetment 

Front of the Proporta Gadget Bag

The two outer bags are each 5.5" x 7.9" x 1.2" in size.  The black metal zipper for each bag is on the front for easy access when attached to the large bag.  The downside is that you can’t quite use the bag to its maximum storage capacity since the opening aperture is shorter than the overall bag width.  Still, there is a respectable amount of space for a PDA, cell phone, portable media player or the like inside.  There is foam padding on the front and rear of the outer bags, around ¼” thick.  However, there is no padding at the top or bottom of the bag. The external bags can be zipped together, too, in case you want a more portable version of a Gadget bag, though the Velcro strap on one bag holding the two bags together (see the Front picture of the Gadget bag to see where this strap is) has to be undone from the hook on the other bag. Keep in mind that when removed from the main bag, the external bags have half of the zipper exposed and the large bag the other half.

The large bag (10.6" x 8.7" x 1.6") has a soft velvet-like interior to help protect stowed devices from scratches and a smaller detachable pouch (5.3" x 4.1" x 1.2") secured to the inner lining with Velcro.  Like the two smaller outer bags, the large bag has ¼” foam padding on the front and back. Next to the inner pouch is a wide elastic band large enough to hold something like an Ipod or other portable music device, or in my case, a GPS unit.  The pouch is large enough to hold my Rhino Skin-encased Axim X51v snugly, so with my Axim’s metal armor and the padding of the pouch my Axim is well protected.  The small bag also has a plastic cable opening on the front.  Given the position of the aperture, this might only be really suitable for earbuds/headphones for a device.  With only my Axim in the pouch, having earbuds attached might be a very tight fit, but for other portable music players this might not be a problem at all.  In any case, there is the very handy potential of being able to have a device in the inner pouch with a user still able to use the headphones.

Conclusion 

Certainly no bag or set of bags so designed to integrate into a complete unit can fulfill every requirement, and despite a few minor issues mentioned above, the Proporta Gadget bag overall worked very well for me, providing a semblance of order for my various devices.  It does offer a number of combinations to suit a user’s needs, and can be very handy keeping similar gadgets grouped together so one need not scramble about the office looking for them.  After all, my laptop has a case where I can stow it and its related peripherals all together, so why not have something for my mobile gadgets too?  Proporta’s Gadget Bag fills this niche nicely.

Dimensions:
Gadget Bag: 10.6" x 8.7" x 2.8" (27cm x 22cm x 7cm)
Bag (without front pockets): 10.6" x 8.7" x 1.6" (27cm x 22cm x 4cm)
Front Pocket: (14cm x 20cm x 3cm) 5.5" x 7.9" x 1.2"
Internal Compartment: 5.3" x 4.1" x 1.2" (13.5cm x 10.5cm x 3cm)