Review: The North Face Surge II Charged Daypack

The North Face has been making mountaineering and hiking gear for years, so you'd think its product designers would know their way around a backpack, right? Well, they do – provided the backpack in question is aimed at folks headed into the wilderness.

But The North Face's new Surge II Charged Daypack is meant for carrying a laptop instead of a pair of crampons; it can simultaneously protect and charge USB-powered hardware, thanks to a built-in battery pack. Unfortunately, if the time I spent with the Surge II is any indication, the company's approach to the charge-while-you-schlep concept could use some tinkering.

It can hold 41 liters' worth of stuff, more than enough space for overnight trip. Or, if you were headed into work, you could fit your lunch, attaché, gym clothes and your laptop and tablet. Its wide, well-padded straps mitigate weight well. No matter what I stuffed into the Surge II Charged Daypack over the week that I tested it, I never felt like the straps were digging into my shoulders.

On the outside of the bag, you'll find a couple of horizontal stash pockets, a water bottle pocket and a zippered pocket that's about the right size for a sunglasses case. For the safety-first set, there's a reinforced loop near the base for a rear bike light, and the chest strap buckle doubles as a rescue whistle.

The Surge II Charged Daypack's roomy interior is subdivided into three main sections: a laptop/tablet compartment, a central carry-all area, and an compartment full of a gazillion small pockets that also contains the aforementioned removable battery pack (more on that in a bit).

The bag's laptop compartment can accommodate computers up to 17 inches. In the front of the laptop compartment, there's an extra smaller sleeve which I found could hold a Nexus 10 tablet snugly. Sounds good right? Well, it would be, if there were adequate padding to protect your hardware from getting knocked around on your commute, or dinged by the rest of the crap in your bag.

The section of bag next the laptop compartment? It's roomy, and I could fit a change of clothes and a dopp kit into it. But a lack of padding between the interior compartments means any hard or heavy gear you jam into it could wind up damaging your laptop or tablet.

The final large, zippered compartment is taken up by a ton of small pockets sized to accommodate smartphones, cables and the like. I get what The North Face was trying to do here, but unfortunately these pockets are too small to allow for much customization. So if you want to stash anything larger than an iPhone 5 or a small external drive, you're hosed.

One of these frustratingly small pockets is designed to hold the backpack's Joey T1 battery: a 5.5-ounce, 5-volt 13Wh lithium polymer battery pack that the company claims can charge a smartphone battery twice, or give a life-extending boost to your tablet or digital camera. (This is the same battery pack Timbuk2 and other bag-makers are using in their charging packs.)

While it was able to power my tablet as advertised, it only managed to charge my iPhone 5's battery 1.25 times. Not cool. Also, while there's plenty of cable management for your devices' charging cables, the Joey T1 battery pack has its own long USB cable for charging it up, and there's nothing to hold it in place. Opening the pack from the top, I found the cable often got in the way of taking my stuff out of the bag.

I wanted to like the Surge II Charged Daypack, but The North Face made that impossible. Conceptually, it's a time-tested pack design from a reputable company. But the lackluster aftermarket battery pack seems to have been added as an afterthought, and the interior appears to have been arranged with very little thought at all. Anyone looking for a new bag and battery to carry and power their gear would be better off buying them separately.

WIRED Comfortable, even when carrying heavier loads. 41 liters is more space than most people will ever need on their daily commute or an overnight trip.

TIRED Minimal padding to protect laptops and tablets. Small interior pockets make the pack less versatile than it could be. Battery implementation feels tacked on, because it is.