Awesome Stuff: Portable Standing Desks

from the make-'em-smaller dept

As you may be aware, I'm a big believer in standing desks, and we've written about standing desk crowdfunding projects in previous awesome stuff post. However, my other obsession concerning working is the ability to have a fully functional "office in a bag" that I can take on the go. I may write about that one of these days in an awesome stuff post, but I have a full setup with a second monitor, portable ergonomic keyboard and more that I take on the go with me -- but I haven't yet found a workable portable standing desk. I'm left at the mercy of wherever I might be at the time, if there's a surface high enough to stand at. The most appealing has been the Ninja Standing desk, which has some really cool features, but is still pretty big when packed up. The more recent StorkStand was pretty creative in that it makes use of chair backs (and we'd mentioned it in the past too, but, again it was not really that portable). However, for whatever reason, there are a bunch of new attempts at offering portable standing desks on Kickstarter -- so this we'll profile them.

• The StandStand Disclaimer: the creator of this project sent a sample one to us to check out. The StandStand portable standing desk focuses on pure simplicity. Three pieces of lightweight wood that slot together to make a compact standing desk, and which can then be stacked up to be about the size of a laptop. Smaller than nearly all other options I've seen, and definitely meets the bill if you just work off of a laptop and want to be able to do standing on the go. Having played around with it, it's a little less stable than I would probably like, but not in any serious way. Of all the options I've seen, definitely the most portable, but there are tradeoffs in terms of what it's useful for compared to other options.
• ZentDesk The ZentDesk looks pretty awesome, actually. Basically it gives you pretty much all of the super useful features of a standing desk, and even comes with monitor stands (which would be very helpful for my setup). The downsides, though, are that it's huge and expensive. These appear to be the basic tradeoffs: simple and small vs. too big but with all the bells and whistles.
• Refold's Portable Cardboard Standing Desk The name of the Refold Portable Cardboard Standing Desk is pretty accurate. It's a foldable cardboard standing desk. When folded up it has a nice handle and you can take it along. But even folded up, it's huge. Bigger than the ZentDesk. You could maybe take it down to the corner coffee shop, but even then you'd need to find a place to put it, rather than a table to put it on, as with the other options.

In the end, none of these portable standing desks truly meet the need that I'm looking for -- and it may just be because it's impossible to have the features I want in a package the size I want. But, it won't mean I won't keep looking...

Filed Under: awesome stuff, portable standing desks, standing desks