It's summer, a time when green things and sunshine inspire you to get away from the warm glow of your computer screen and into the oft-forgotten analog world outside your door. But no real gadget geek can handle Internet withdrawal for more than a couple hours, which usually means lugging a laptop everywhere you go. Thankfully, there's no shortage of bags, sleeves and satchels to help facilitate our portable PC needs.

Built, a company with an all-encompassing love of neoprene and a penchant for color contrasts, sent us a pair of its products, the Cargo Laptop Sleeve and Laptop Porter, and I must say I'm impressed with the design and comfort of both, if not the price.

First up, the Cargo Laptop Sleeve comes in three sizes, and four colors, for laptops of the 13, 15, and 17-inch varieties. The olive-colored model Built sent us looks good, and the loops of stitches around one side add visual flair while creating three external pockets of varying size for accessories.

The largest pocket could easily hold a large external hard drive or the cables and charging brick for your laptop. The medium pocket is a good size for a smaller hard drive or a mouse, and the small pocket would be right for storing a USB drive, keys, or a small MP3 player. Just make sure you get the right size sleeve for your laptop, though, because there are no zippers on the sleeve's external pockets: It's just the tension on the neoprene that holds your accessories in place. If your laptop doesn't fit snugly in the sleeve, expect things to fall out of the pockets.

Built's $40-to-$50 asking price for the Cargo Laptop Sleeve is a bit steep, but the stitching and thick, soft neoprene should keep your laptop safer than a cheap sleeve.

The $70 Laptop Porter is sort of midway between a sleeve and a full-on laptop bag. Zippered up at the top, with a hand-hole for lifting and carrying, it's a fine sleeve in its own right. But slip the included strap through a pair of holes on either side of the sleeve and it becomes a bag; two large exterior compartments on the outside can hold folders or cables.

The strap literally hangs from stitch-reinforced holes in the neoprene, which makes the elastic material absorb much of the shock and weight of your laptop. The bag is enjoyable to use, though I'm not sure how well the material will hold up. And be careful when you set the bag down, because the exterior pockets don't close.

Again, the tension from your laptop will go a long way toward keeping things in the external pockets, but I wouldn't be too comfortable commuting with a bag like this, as the open side pockets make anything other than flat papers and folders an enticing target for thieves. And if you're not careful, simply setting the bag down could spill the contents of the pockets onto the floor. A couple of old-school buttons would have gone a long way towards keeping the bag's contents more secure, without marring the pleasingly simple aesthetic of the bag.

The Laptop Porter comes in black, brown, or "wood grain black," which, given the soft neoprene material, looks more like zebra than wood. And I'm not sure if this is the same for all colors, but the brown bag I looked at had a bright green zipper and interior. It's visually interesting, but not for everyone.