As someone who is almost never separated from his laptop, I have formulated some pretty opinionated ideas about what makes a good laptop for a business traveller. Weight is, without a doubt, the first thing to consider. Lugging around a 2 kilo plus laptop just isn’t on if you always have it over your shoulder. Next comes connectivity. You want to be able to use it to connect to the internet anywhere – wi-fi now comes as standard on virtually every laptop. But business travellers will probably want to invest in a laptop that also has a built-in SIM card to access mobile networks where hotspots are unavailable. Durability is vital too. A well-built laptop will suffer the knocks and bangs that a life on the road brings.

Here are my five favourite laptops that fit the bill. Not all of them tick all the boxes but unless you have an unlimited budget, you may have to make a compromise.

Asus Eee

A business travel laptop for under a grand? Crazy, no. How about one for under £250 then? Enter the Asus Eee. The unusual name comes from the tagline 'Easy to Learn, Easy to Work, Easy to Play'. With the unusual name comes an unusual laptop. It runs on Linux (with Windows pre-installed if you must) and has solid state memory of up to 8GB rather than a hard disk, making it super-quick to boot up.

The Eee is the size of a large paperback book and weighs less than a kilo so you could just about carry it in a large suit pocket or slip it into a small briefcase. At this size you only get a small screen – 7 inches across – but that’s fine for writing emails, amending spreadsheets and the like. The keyboard feels a little cramped, naturally, but is fine for anything other than continual use.

At this size and price there’s no CD or DVD drive in the book but it does come with wi-fi.

£239 from Mesh (4GB version)

Dialogue Flybook V33i HSDPA

While the major manufacturers are now playing catch-up with regard to connectivity, the Flybook range has had the works all along, including an integrated SIM card, letting you use your mobile phone data network when hooking up to a hotspot is out of the question. This means you can hook up to 1.8 Mbps download speeds whenever these are offered by your mobile network - increasingly common in the UK and major business destinations. The 8.9 inch screen is surprisingly clear and has a hidden surprise – you can swivel it round to work like a tablet as well as a standard laptop. Nice trick. It tips the scales at a lightweight 1.23 kilos. Battery life is not spectacular at between two and three hours though.

£1,513 from Expansys

MacBook

Apple has been slow to jump into the ultraportable market but the MacBook, toting a 13.3 inch widescreen, just makes it into the business traveller-friendly category, particularly for those who wouldn’t been seen dead with something from the Great House of Gates. The black MacBook (it also comes in white) bears an uncanny resemblance to the Sinclair Spectrum, thanks to the spaced out raised keys of its keyboard. This isn’t limited to the 48K of that early computer but instead a whole gig of RAM and a hard drive expandable up to 250GB. There’s an onboard DVD-ROM drive with a beautifully simple insertion slot too – Windows laptop designers take note. Six hours battery life will keep most road warriors happy. The downside – the 2.27 kilo weight.

£697 from Dabs.com (1GB RAM, 80GB hard drive version)

Sony TZ21WN/B

Sony has a long pedigree in creating luscious lightweight laptops that are perfect for the business traveller…at a price. The latest incarnation is the Vaio TZ21. It’s lovely looking as you would expect from Sony and even manages to fit in an 11.1 inch screen, despite only weighing a shade under 1.2 kilos.

Other business-friendly attributes include onboard high-speed 3G connectivity (3.6Mbps HSDPA), wi-fi and a built-in fingerprint reader – handy for keeping your business affairs secure from prying eyes. The battery is a stayer too, providing up to 6 hours of use on a single charge. This powerful bundle comes at a price – a cool £1,800.

£1,799 from Sony Style

Toshiba Portege R500

With a battery life of up to eight hours, this baby will keep you going all the way across the Atlantic with no need for a power socket. There are a range of hard drive options, up to 160GB and even a solid-state 64GB version for faster speeds and lighter weight (just 0.78kg). To keep the weight down, the designers have thrown away the DVD drive that the others consider essential but few people use them regularly in any case, other than to watch movies. The R500 lacks mobile broadband which some might be beginning to think is a must-have on the road but there’s no denying that this is a desirable device even without it. The thin 12.1 inch screen brings down the weight but may lose something in resilience. I suspect long on-the-road usage may prove a challenge.

£1,879 from Toshiba (64GB solid state version)