Camelbak Daxio review

Camelbak Daxio review

Slightly puzzling rucksack with bottle-based drinking system

Our rating

3

75.00
56.99

Published: April 23, 2008 at 1:00 pm

Our review
Not a bad bag in itself, but the concept is flawed

Camelbak has been making excellent hydration systems since it invented them, and now the new Daxio is here with its groundbreaking, erm, bottle. Yes, it’s a bottle-based system. Your 60 quid buys you the bag and one bottle. So, let’s take those two elements separately…

The Daxio rucksack itself has a lot going for it. At 26 litres it’s a good size for commuting, day rides and mountain biking. It’s comfortable and well made too. There’s a main compartment with a padded laptop sleeve (big enough for a Macbook, not big enough for a 17in widescreen), a secondary pocket with a good organiser and keysafe, and a fleece-lined pouch for your iPod. It’s a bit short on reflectives, but the Velcro tabs to tidy away the loose straps are a nice touch.

The Camelbak Better Bottle is good too. It’s well made from tough polycarbonate, with a carry handle, a non-spill bite valve and an internal straw so you don’t have to tip it up to drink. As bottles go, it’s an excellent choice – if expensive (it’ll cost you £10 on its own).

Up until this point the Daxio seems well-considered, but Camelbak also sells a hands-free adapter (for about £10) that turns the bottle into a fully-fledged hydration system. This seems to make very little sense on two counts. The 500ml bottle is much too small to be used as a reservoir for a hydration system. There is a 750ml version available too, but even that has just half the capacity of Camelbak’s smallest bladder-based systems. A bladder will cost you only a few pounds more than the adapter, so if you need the tube you might as well buy a proper bladder and get the extra capacity – in fact the laptop sleeve doubles up nicely as a reservoir pocket for this very purpose.

All this means it’s hard to see what the point of the Daxio is, really. If you just want a nice rucksack and a nice bottle then it’s worth a punt; it’s not cheap but they're both good quality.

With the adapter it seems to be a very expensive way to get a system that’s inferior to a reservoir-based one, and there’s a host of better options out there.

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