For those who prefer not to carry a 2kg laptop or an often feature-limited PDA or a bulky smartphone, you still can be a road warrior, in a sense. :) Basically what you need is to be able to have the same computing experience wherever you may go, which means that you will have to be able to carry all your data and application preferences everywhere. To do this, you need a USB thumb drive with enough capacity to store the most basic applications you need such as email client, browser and office productivity suite.

Unfortunately, I have not found any portable app solutions for Linux. However, you can easily bring an Ubuntu Linux Live CD and a USB thumb drive to store your preferences and data. Just boot up the computer and that is it. You will have your Linux computer in no time. This will not work with most internet cafe computers, though. You'd be lucky if you can find one that runs on Linux.

For Mac users, packages come in disk images format (.DMG). It is highly portable. Just double-click on it to mount it and you can practically run any application in the disk image. It can even contain any type of data. So, this is very portable. I just wish that Linux (and Microsoft, for that matter) makes it this easy to install and uninstall applications. No centralized "registry" to maintain, no DLLs to update, etc.

For Windows, it is a bit more complicated to run applications without installing it first - requiring you to have admin privileges, which is next to impossible on internet cafe computers (if you find one that provides you with admin privileges, let me know please hehe). Anyway, it used to be that you only need a single .EXE file to run and that is it but this is no longer the norm. So, what we need is a list of applications that are portable - that you can run without installing it first.

The prime source for portable applications is none other than portableapps.com. It contains a plethora of applications that run on practically all existing Microsoft Windows OS versions after 98. :) For your email needs, there is Portable Thunderbird.

Your unified browsing experience can be had by using Portable Firefox. Add Portable GAIM to keep you in touch with your AOL, MSN, Yahoo! and ICQ buddies.

If you need access to an office suite, now there is a Portable OpenOffice.org package. Yes, just install it on your USB thumb drive and that is it. Plug it in a Windows-based computer and you have your own partition, basically. All functionalities that you need are already bundled.

Personally, I just use a cross-platform version of the Portable Firefox. This allows me to have Firefox that runs on a Mac and Windows with all my plug-ins, extensions, themes and preferences. Bookmarks are synced between the two portable firefox versions. Besides, I have all my bookmarks available in my .Mac account. :)

Although I prefer using OpenOffice.org, there is not portable version for Mac OS X. The next best thing is to use Writely.com as your word processor. A web-based Web 2.0 application that runs perfectly fine on Firefox. What is even better is that it supports .DOC and .ODT.

All of these could have been easier had developers churned out Java versions of these applications. Now that definitely will be portable, I think. :P