The jacket that lets you stash 42 gadgets

By BBC

As I swim in the ocean of shiny new tech that surrounds me at CES, I find myself wondering where on earth I would put all this stuff if I had to take it with me.

One firm I met there thinks it has the answer – in the form of a jacket with 42 secret pockets, each tailored for a specific device.

Scotte Vest’s $150 (£120) sleeveless gilet is an Aladdin’s cave of pockets: it includes a laptop-sized space on the back, somewhere to store a tablet in each of the front panels, an inside breast pocket for smartphones made out of touchscreen-friendly material and a channel for headphone cables or chargers.

It also contains a sunglasses pouch with attached cleaning cloth.

However, the firm does not recommend using all 42 pockets at once.

“It is having a pocket for what you need at the moment,” said spokesman Luke Lappala.

“If style isn’t necessarily your number one priority, you could fit everything you ever need in there.”

I can vouch for that, after stashing my 11in (28cm) laptop, charging cable and plug, smartphone, tablet, radio equipment, battery power bar and notebook in a single Scotte Vest garment.

I didn’t look or feel particularly elegant, and the weight of the laptop alone almost tipped me over twice – but once the load had settled onto my shoulders I began to feel like I was wearing a backpack rather than a gilet.

It was surprisingly difficult to get everything back out again after this little experiment. I could feel the charger about my person but it took me a while to locate the pocket it was in. Helpfully, each garment comes with a small fabric map setting out the location of all the pockets.

The idea was born in the year 2000 when chief executive Scott Jordan almost damaged his ears in an airport after getting a headphone cable tangled on a doorknob, Mr Lappala told me.

It was inspired by the traditional fisherman’s vest.

Scotte Vest claims to have sold more than 10 million garments so far, ranging from trench coats to shorts, all with varying tallies of pockets.

It is great for travellers, said Mr Lappala. And drone pilots.

The firm even has a rival in the form of the J25 made by AyeGear – although as its name suggests, that one has a mere 25 storage areas.

I can’t believe I’ve come to Las Vegas to write about pockets.