February 2009 – LIVEdigitally

Chrome bags look bitchin’. The question is, do they function as well as they look? I mean, the logo is rad, the seat-belt style buckle is unbelievably cool, and the color choices kick almost everyone elses behinds. (Timbuk2 bags also offers cool color varietals, but they just seem so darn preppy.) Nah, in terms of cool factor, Chrome bags definitely carry the day. But I’m probably getting ahead of myself. Let me backtrack.

This review is about messenger bags, bike messenger bags, and specifically those made by Chrome. While we generally stick to gadgets here at LD, we have reviewed laptop bags in the past. I got my grubby mitts on a Citizen Bike Messenger bag from Chrome Industries, based in foggy San Francisco, CA. Typically a messenger bag is a single shoulder bag that opens horizontally, has one main strap, a large primary compartment, some level of secondary organizational compartments, and then a myriad of different possible accessories. These might include some degree of padding, a laptop compartment, stabilizer straps, a removable primary strap, a grab handle, etc. etc. ad nauseum. (I like bags.)

Working daily in San Francisco, I keep seeing Chrome gear all over the place. Mostly they’re carried by dirt-baggy, scruffy faced ruffians who nimbly dodge through traffic and congregate during lunch on Market and Montgomery (read: bike messengers.) The other primary class of people carrying these bags are poseurs. I mean, serious wannabes who think the logo is cool and want to seem hip with their designer, hip-hugger jeans, their button down shirts with swirly embroidery, their stupid looking goatee with pencil-thin sideburns on their jawline and their aviator sunglasses… yeah, you know who I mean. I don’t want to be that guy. And I’m not sure I can pull off the Citizen, especially off my bike (you know, just walking around.)

Now, to be clear, I am looking at messenger bags from a particular perspective. I do use it on my bike, I commute from San Mateo to San Francisco using my bicycle and the Caltrain. My typical time on the bike varies between 45 minutes to 1 hour and 45 minutes per day, depending on which route I choose. So I am doing a fair amount of biking with the bag. But I am not a bike messenger. This means a couple things. I am not on my bike 8 hours a day. And I specifically need to carry a few key items, not all kinds of random crap for delivery across the city. I am commuting to work, not routing back and forth across a concrete jungle. I need to carry:

laptop
power charger
sunglasses
a book
a layer
a snack
an iphone charging cord
gum

I’m on the train for part of my commute, so I frequently need to yank out my computer, or get to my book to catch up on some leisure reading. I want the bag to be comfortable, even when heavily weighted. I want it to be weather proof, I get caught by rain frequently, especially in the Winter time. I’d like some organization options, multiple pockets and compartments. Ideally I’d like a padded laptop sleeve, so that I can pop out the computer without having to scrabble past all the other junk in my bag. And I want it to look dope. Yeah, I’m vain. I deal with it, and so should you.

Before I ever picked one up, I went to the streets and asked some regular folks sporting Chrome what they thought. One person complained that though he was really excited at first, he didn’t like the fact that it was just a big sack. One big hole to drop stuff into, with little or no organizational options. This is one of my concerns too. On the one hand, I like simplicity. The Citizen is straightforward – it’s a bag, it holds stuff. There are a few pockets. One zippered, one non-zippered, and a couple of pen / pencil sleeves.

This is sufficient for most of the small items, and offers a decent level of organization. My biggest gripe, organizationally speaking, is really the lack of a laptop sleeve and the lack of padding. It would be great to be able to pull out the laptop and leave the rest of my gear undisturbed. As it is, I use a neoprene sleeve that I bought aftermarket in order to put some padding around my way-too-expensive mac. This works fine, but the sleeve would be a nice built-in feature.

It’s important to note here that the Citizen is not intended to be, and was not designed to be a laptop bag. It’s a messenger bag, for carrying stuff around on a bike. I am choosing to use a messenger bag as a laptop bag. If I use a screwdriver to drive a nail, I might succeed in pounding the sucker in, but I also might get some bent nails. That being said, more and more people are bike commuting all the time – lord knows it’s hard to get a seat on the Caltrain for the 8:15AM train. So I think I’m not the only person who’d benefit from a couple of design alterations. And Chrome, btw, does offer some laptop-oriented bags. But none of them are quite like the classic “messenger-style” bags, and none of their messenger bags really hit the mark for the computer commuter.

Another oddity to me is the stabilizer strap. It seems to me like it ought to run opposite of the primary strap. In other words, if I wear the bag on my left shoulder, then the stabilizer strap should logically come up my right side, no? Well, Chrome disagrees, and their stabilizer runs along the same side as the primary strap, and runs under armpit (see left.) I found this to be pretty ineffective – the bag rolls on me just as much with this as without it.

There are a couple of things I would change about this bag, to make it the perfect bag for me. Let me reiterate – these are not necessarily shortcomings in the bag itself (at least not all of them); rather, these are things that would improve the bag for my purposes:

Padded laptop sleeve (I’ve covered this)
Waterproof zipper with storm-sleeve to access the laptop sleeve – it would be awesome to be able to yank out the laptop without needing to unbuckle two clips and rip apart massive velcro.
Better stabilizer strap – I think it ought to come from the other side of the bag

The lack of a zipper will stop me from using this bag when I travel. It’s just too difficult to pull things out of the bag when it’s stuffed under the seat in front of me when I’m riding coach in an airplane. All that velcro, ugh. But I can also understand not wanting to compromise the waterproof integrity of the bag. And for riding into work everyday, I am willing to put up with the shortcomings because there a lot of things I really like. I’ll tell you what I think makes this bag a big winner:

The buckle – it’s darn near iconic in San Francisco, and it’s just like a seatbelt in a car. That’s rad.
The materials – ballistic nylon and truck tarpaulin are badass, durable and waterproof
The anatomical, padded shoulder strap – even heavily loaded this is a comfortable bag to ride with, even without any padding to speak of
Shoulder strap again, specifically, the way it holds the bag upright – with a lot of other messenger bags I’ve used (including an Osprey and a Jandd bag) there is a constant tendency for the bag to swing sideways. The shoulder strap on the Chrome messengers actually hold the bag more or less vertically, and the shape itself (with a little help from gravity) actually hold it in place. It was this design element that first caught my eye.
The one-handed tightener and loosener on the chest strap

The Citizen from Chrome is an outstanding messenger bag with an unusual and innovative design, outstanding materials, the sweetest logo on the market, a wickedly cool (unbreakable?) buckle, and awesome color options. There are some things it does really well, and others that could stand improvement. But on the whole I think the bag will serve well enough for my biking commuter-geek purposes, and it’s clearly outstanding for the purpose for which it was originally intended – to be a bike messenger bag that will last for years of hard abuse. When I’m riding my bike, I’m stoked to have this bag cause it’s comfortable, functional, and cool-looking. When I’m not on my bike and I carry this bag, I feel like a poseur, a big lame-o that’s trying too hard to look cool.

If I were forced to give this bag a numeric rating between 1 and 10, I’d have to split things up a bit. For the purposes of a computer-commuter bag, I’d give it a 7. As a travel bag it’s a 5. And as a bike messenger bag this one is a 10. If I change career paths and start delivering packages via bicycle, I won’t carry anything else. (I’d be laughed at, scoffed and mocked by the other guys if I did anyway.)

This review is also available at 1TO10REVIEWS.

I’ve always detested one (or two) thing(s) about my iphone. My primary moan? Why not make the landscape keyboard more widely available? On a scale from 1 to 10, using a portrait keyboard to type emails on an iPhone is immensely sucky.

Apple made landscape work in Safari; if you’re in the browser and have to type (in the URL, or in a form) the keyboard pops up in landscape mode. This means the keys are bigger, more widely spaced, and significantly easier to tap. This is good usability. In either SMS or email mode, I can only use the portrait keyboard. This is poor usability. Given the fact that the capability exists, I can’t see any reason not to make the functionality universally available.

Lots of people told me that I’d get used to the keyboard if I gave it enough time. They were wrong. It sucks. It sucked a year and a half ago, and it sucks now too. Hence my joy, my excitement, my joie de iPhone that Firemail exists. Firemail is an application available in the App store that lets a user type emails with a landscape keyboard. Lawdy lawdy, I thought the day would never come. The folks at Conceited Software are to thank for this handy piece of code. Let me do so now. Thank you Conceited Software. Try not to let it go to your head. Pun intended.

Now, the mechanics of the thing are not entirely ideal. In order to write these blessedly quick and easy to type emails, you have to load Firemail from your homescreen, not the email app. When the app opens you will be able to compose a subject and message. Once done with your composition you can save a draft (called a bookmark) or send to email. This is great for writing a new email. But what about replying to old emails? That too is possible, here’s how:

Open your email app
Open an email
Hit reply
Hit the home button
Open Firemail
Draft your response
Select “Send to Mobile Mail”
Boom shaka laka. Your email is now a reply to the email you were reading before.

I didn’t even know you could do this till I read a couple other reviews of this app. iPhone Hacks put a great one together, and so did Ben Boychuck at Macworld. Personally, I think it’s a very strong app, and it has a place on my homescreen. I do wish it integrated a little more seamlessly with the iPhone email, but it’s a very solid app and allows me to do something that’s frustrated me since my very first week with the iPhone.

The app used to be free – it was free when I downloaded it a couple months ago. Now they charge 99 cents for it, and I think it’s definitely worth that fee. It turns iPhone email from something frustrating and terrible into something that’s reasonably not sucky. If I were forced to give Firemail a numeric rating between 1 and 10, I’d call it a 7.