After a trial of trying to pack this with the items I would typically take on a short business trip, I returned this. Despite it being a large backpack, I couldn't find room for travel items.
Some of the pictures don't match the bag I got--on close examinations, it looks like two different bags are shown in the photos in the product description. The photo shows a nice compartment for pens, &c.--the bag I got has a compartment but it doesn't open as far as shown, only has a couple of loops for pens or pencils off to the side, and the loops are too tight to hold anything thicker than a cross pen.
The two small compartments on the back are very flat, and won't hold anything very bulky like noise cancelling headphones or a laptop charger brick. Every other compartment is deep, with no internal divisions to prevent everything in them from falling to the bottom.
Pros: It will hold a large laptop, and let you unzip it and lay flat to run through an airport checkpoint.
Cons: It won't hold much else. I tried finding room for the other things I would travel with for an overnight trip: laptop charger, phone, media player, noise canceling headphones, some magazines, water bottle, a granola bar, spare pen, a baggy with toothpaste, &c. I quickly ran out of room. I could have crammed everything into one of the deep compartments, but it would have all fallen to the bottom and been difficult to get at. Since I have a small laptop--I like to travel light--the space in the laptop compartment was mostly wasted. There's no internal compartmentation in there to put anything else in with it.
It seemed to be fairly sturdy construction. Might be okay for a student, carrying laptop and notebooks (but the lay flat feature is useless in that case.) It's just not very well thought out for a carry-on or overnight bag, however.
