Review on Solo Altitude Laptop Backpack Black by Abbie Garcia

I've searched everywhere for the perfect lightweight laptop bag for meetings and domestic flights. I wanted so badly to give this bag a positive review, but there are too many silly and small flaws preventing me from doing so. I bought this bag for the following reasons: Light interior for locating items: CheckTop pocket for quickly grabbing small items Features: CheckLuggage pen loop on back: CheckLuggage bottle pocket: Check Separate laptop and tablet pockets: CheckMOLLE system, to temporarily add extra storage : CheckDurable: Check Doesn't look like an obvious laptop bag : CheckPros: The Solo Altitude has a few attractive features. The yellow interior is very good at helping me find those small items, which is handy. Being able to put my bag on the luggage handle is a big plus as that's how I get around the airport most of the time. Laptop and tablet pockets are well organized and easily accessible. Durability seems to offer. I assume this bag will last a long time. Padded back and shoulder straps are comfortable for hours. Simple things are silly mistakes, like the pen pockets inside that are too small to actually fit a regular sized pen in the pen clip. This makes it easy for the pens to slip out of the pen pockets. Slightly deeper pen pockets would have avoided this problem entirely. The other inner pockets are very loose and have no top flap. All of this means that items will very easily slip out of their smaller internal pockets and end up on the bottom of the bag unless you keep the bag upright the whole time. The smaller top pocket was a big request from me so I could quickly grab something small in a meeting. The problem is that its position on the bag and its use as a 'valve' means anything of any weight or volume means the bag will dangle anywhere. For example, my laptop charger can cause the bag to dangle a lot. When I open packets it immediately pushes down on the top front of the bag exposing the rest of the bag. Other bags I've used have this top pocket, not this one. It quickly got very annoying. The front closure is necessary to keep upper pocket wobble to a minimum, but it limits access to the lower pocket. Since I need to store heavier small items like a laptop charger in the bottom pocket to keep the top pocket from dangling, I no longer have quick access to those items. Another problem is that the elastic band for the side water bottle pocket hardly fits in a normal water bottle. If you have your own bottle, even slightly larger than the regular 20 oz. bottle, it probably won't fit. I'm not sure why they didn't just make it a little bigger. The MOLLE straps on the sides don't really sit on the sides unless the bag is fully and perfectly stuffed with items. Otherwise they sit further forward and also hang down, which makes them very impractical. They also require horizontal straps, while most skinny and tall bags require vertical straps, making them mostly useless. The MOLLE straps on the bottom are almost useless as they don't allow the bag to lay flat. This leaves MOLLE straps at the front, which are very far apart and therefore only fit in a few pouches. Don't even consider MOLLE in a top pocket for the above reasons. Although there are side straps that you can tighten to make the bag smaller when empty, these straps sit very low on the bag. This means they don't actually tighten the pouch. Anything bulky at the bottom of the bag will most likely just be pushed up and not just pulled into the bag. You either need to raise these straps up a bit or have a second set if you really want to use them to make the bag thinner. The decisions only showed how little they paid attention to details.