Mossberg says do-it-all phones and ipods can replace laptop when on the road

In his column this week, Imagine It: The Sun, Some Ancient Ruins, You With No Laptop (subscription required) Walt Mossberg of the Wall Street Journal writes of his vacation trip sans PC. Bottom line is that thanks to his Blackberry and iPod he “didn’t miss” his laptop and claims the experience convinced him that “even some short, light-duty business trips could be conducted without a laptop.”

Mossberg used the enhanced BlackBerry 8700c phone which will soon be sold in the U.S. by Cingular, and found that it served well as a Web browsing device, but Cingular’s BlackBerry Internet Service mail storage at a paltry 25 megabytes was far too limited.

The $30 iPod Camera Connector allows you to download your pictures onto the iPods hard disk and is a workable backup and viewing solution.

Since both items are more convenient to use on a plane compared to a laptop (and much lighter to carry) I’m eager to see if this combination of tools will catch on with travelers.