GearFlogger

Lowepro Urban Reporter 250 photographer's bag

What can you say about Lowepro? They know what photographers want and need, and they make a metric s**t-ton of lustworthy bags for every conceivable purpose.

The Urban Reporter 250 is designed to merge your camera and computing gear in one everyday bag. The flapover design is stylish enough for around town, and the padded insert is tough enough to handle rough road trips.

Along with the camera organizer insert there's a separate laptop sleeve that will hold anything 15" or smaller, and the front pocket has enough organization for the most Germanic of shooters. Even the magazine sleeve on the side has a zippered bottom for double-duty to fit over a luggage handle for easy airporting.

The Urban Reporter really does it all with aplomb, and perhaps the most valuable feature is that it doesn't scream, "hey, valuable photog gear inside!" For covert carry of all your digital detritus, check out the Lowepro Urban Reporter 250.

$118.00 at Amazon

Therm-a-Rest Antares sleeping bag

We all know and love Therm-a-Rest sleeping pads. Now along comes a fart sack, made to pair with the NeoAir sleeping pads. The Antares has a few cool tricks up its sleeves.

The Antares is updated for 2014 and is now comfort rated to 15F, thanks to added box baffling for the 750+ down, which seems like a reasonable rating to us if you're using a decent pad. Our bag weighed 2lb 4oz with included storage bag, a bit more than the official 1lb 15oz list weight but still on the lighter side of average. Fit is Goldilocks, not too small and not too big.

The Antares puts its weight to good use, packing in a collar, draft tube and trapezoidal foot box, as well as a internal stash pocket. The real trick on this pony is the strap system that holds it to a sleeping pad. Two elastic straps let you toss and turn to your heart's delight while keeping the bag static. Using two straps instead of a sleeve means side sleeper don't feel like they're wearing a straight jacket, because the bag can flex with your knees without coming off the pad.

The system works as advertised, which is good because the Antares doesn't have any insulation on the back of the torso area. Overall the Antares is a great bag to pair with a great pad, and guaranteed to keep you from rolling onto a cold tent floor in the wee hours.

$379.95 at Backcountry

Sierra Designs Flash 2 tent

Sierra Designs is one of the leading innovators in outdoor gear these days. The Flash 2 tent is a great design that provides quick pitching and great livability if you're willing to pack just a little extra weight and give up a bit of storm tolerance.

The Flash 2 is a three season, two person shelter that weighs in on our scale at 4lb 4oz for the complete package, including guylines, stakes, tent, sack and poles. Or should we say HOLY MOTHER OF GOD POLE! There are two poles, one just a meter long and the other an unholy conglomeration of three poles in an H layout. Don't let yourself be intimidated, it actually speeds up pitching a lot. Just snap everything together, lay it on top of the tent fabric and you should have it done and done within a few minutes. It's really pretty slick.

Once up you've got a hybrid single/double wall design. The main part of the tent has a bathtub floor and mesh walls and ceiling, with a permanently attached fly that has two small awnings at the ends and two large vestibules on the sides. Here's where the magic comes in. Each side has it's own big-ass door, and this combined with the steep inner walls makes it feel very roomy inside, especially for those of us who have come to expect that "two person tent" means two very good friends (make your buddy smile!). It's a neat design for those who spend a lot of time in a tent. Each person having their own vestibule makes gear storage a snap, as well as facilitating those late night and early morning "call of duty" exits. There is superb ventilation, and two small flaps on the ends can be dropped for a marginal increase in airflow.

The Flash 2 is a little porky weight-wise, but not so much for the increased livability. The only other caveat is that it's not a free-standing design, it really needs to be staked out, and guyed well in high-wind areas. Other than that if you're looking for a little more room, easy entries and exits, and the increased storage and utility that two vestibules offer (camping with two dogs?), the Flash 2 is waiting for you.

$270.73 (on sale from $339.95) at REI

SPOT Global Phone

Satellite phones are awesome tools. If you're old enough to remember the first cell phone you owned and the feeling of freedom plus communication, it's pretty much that all over again.

The SPOT Global Phone is a feathery 7.1 ounce (with battery) communicator that uses the Globalstar satellite system. There are two major caveats to this phone. The first is the Globalstar network, which apparently can be, well, spotty. It worked fine for us testing it in Alaska, but ask around to find out which network (Globarstar, Iridium and Thuraya are the three big ones) works where you'll need it to. The other caveat is that pricing contracts are not transparent, so again, do your research.

That out of the way, the SPOT Global Phone worked like a champ for us all around Southcentral Alaska. It's small and light (for a sat phone) and the antenna makes you look well-endowed in polite company. The screen is also on the small side, displaying a row of status icons and just four lines of twelve characters each of text. It's rated at four hours of talk time and 36 hours standby, but you can push both of those a bit. Durability-wise, the light weight of the SPOT made us more careful with it than we might have been with a ruggedized unit, which it definitely is not. If you're the fumble-fingered type - you know who you are - get a case and use a lanyard. There's no lanyard hole, so you'll have to rig your own around the space between the antenna and the battery compartment.

Call quality is fair to good, usability is better than average, the more so since the SPOT has a dedicated US phone number. One feature that apparently has been dropped is Short Message Service, a.k.a. SMS or texting. Bummer, because that's useful. Data capability is available but slow, like in early 1990s dial-up slow. Last gripe: the charger is ginormous. Seriously, the brick and cord together are almost as big as the phone itself. Is USB compatibility (hello, solar chargers!) that difficult?

Overall, the SPOT Global Phone has some tradeoffs, so look into it to make sure it will work for you. If you can decipher the calling plans, live with toting the charger around, and don't care about texting or data - in other words, if you're just looking for decent quality voice calls - check out the SPOT.

$499.95 at REI

Kidz Gear headphones

Kids. Long trips in planes, trains and automobiles. You better be good at killing time time or you might want to kill yourself to get out of the misery. Good parents try to minimize screen time, but every parent knows there comes a point at which it's not reasonable to expect kids to entertain themselves on hour eight in the same seat on an international flight.

And when that time comes, that fancy screen will be a lot more entertaining with audio. Problem: kids don't like headphones. Solution: fun-looking headphones built for kids. Kidz Gear has it wired, literally, with their corded headphones for kids. They come in bright colors, are sized appropriately, adjust easily and best of all are volume limited to protect their precious little ears. They even include a good quality storage bag with drawstrings.

Our 2.5 year old didn't like them at first, but with a little gentle coaching he eventually realized he could hear Disney-Pixar's Cars a lot better with headphones on. From then on they were HIS headphones and now all is good. Seriously, given the problem this solved for us the price looks like perhaps the greatest bargain in the history of time.

$19.99 at Amazon

 

Suunto Ambit ABC GPS HRM watch

Watch, my fishbelly white ass. The Suunto Ambit is a supercomputer for your wrist, with the TLAs (that's Three Letter Acronyms) to match: it's an altimeter-barometer-compass with global positioning system and a heart rate monitor rolled into a 2.7 ounce slab of rubber, plastic and metal that runs your life from the end of your arm.

Rather than give you a laundry list of the impressive range of features and functions on the Ambit, all of which are exceedingly capable, we'll try here to give you a sense of its usability, which is what will determine at the end of the day whether you actually do use it. Physically, the Ambit is not slim by any means, but it's relatively compact for all its horsepower and rides easily on even a small wrist thanks to its wide strap. The Ambit comes with a soft and comfortable HRM strap and a USB cable with a pinch connector that fastens on to the watch itself to recharge and transfer data to your computer. Battery life without GPS is pretty good, weeks to a month depending on how much you tax it. With GPS logging enabled, endurance shrinks to a couple of days of full-time use. If you're on expedition think about a solar charger.

The physical specs are the easy part. The bottom line on the Ambit is the software: it's a fantastic piece of technology that sets the standard for its category, but like any sophisticated piece of technology the investment does not end with the purchase price. You need to put the time in to understand its dizzying array of features and functions, how to access them and how to customize them to make the limited screen space work effectively for you. You also need to get to know Movescount.com, the online dashboard that will manage all this data for you; think Facebook for fitness, although thankfully you can turn off all the social features if you want.

And here's the rub: the manual for the Ambit is not great. Some might even say it sucks. Just finding the thermometer reading was an exercise in self-control. The Moveslink local software and the Movescount website are better, but certainly could stand to be improved. Just know in advance you're going to want to take at least an hour or two to do the initial setup, and plan on spending significantly more time as you collect and download your data to understand how to work with it.

That said, anything this complex with such a small display is operating within certain usability constraints. The first way the Ambit gets around this is by allowing you to customize the display to work with your sport-specific demands. The second way the Ambit breaks free from its screen real estate limitations is by allowing you to do almost all of this customization online through Movescount.com. Set the data you see on screen, as well as the personal fitness data, including heart rate zones, used to calculate your stats. Download data from your usage - called moves here - and then dig into the details. You'll get everything from calories to training effect, with the ability to graph to your heart's content. GPS data is displayed on Google maps.

The social side of things may or may not be your bag, but it's cool to see the beta on someone else's trip up the West Buttress. You can even download apps. Our favorite is the one that lets you figure out how many beers you've earned during your exercise session. There's an app designer if you're really feeling adventurous, although we are still gathering the courage to test that particular feature.

So this is already the longest review we've ever written, but hopefully you get the point: the Ambit does everything it claims to and a lot more, if you are willing to put the time in to get to know the software. If that's the kind of hands-on nuts-and-bolts experience you're looking for, the Suunto Ambit will transport you to data nirvana.

$550.00 at REI