We're big fans of the Surface Book 2 at Windows Central. The bold and beautiful 2-in-1 is a premium device, with power, engineering quality, and versatility. The Book 2, in both its 13-inch and 15-inch variants, is also very portable. As such, it's highly recommended that you use at least some form of case while carrying this thing, whether it's a dedicated laptop bag, or a sleeve that you might place in a larger backpack.
When I travel, it tends to be for longer periods of time. As such, I take more than just my laptop with me, yet I don't want to carry multiple bags. Placing my laptop in a bag by itself risks other items clattering around into it during travel. I tend to go for sleeves rather than straight-up laptop bags as a result. Even if you prefer laptop bags, placing your laptop in a sleeve in addition to the bag offers extra protection, particularly with a device as expensive as the Surface Book 2.
This is why I ended up checking out the HEX Recon sleeve, which we featured in out best Surface Book 2 sleeve recommendations article. It quickly became one of my many favorite Surface Book 2 accessories, and I thought I'd explain why.
Luxury meets durability
The HEX Recon bag is built to fit 15-inch laptops, and it's specifically advertised on Amazon as being for the MacBook Pro. I found that it fits the Surface Book 2 near-perfectly, even with the Book 2's irregular "wedge" profile.
The HEX Recon bag is made of waxed canvas, and sports a charcoal color. The canvas material is prone to picking up dust marks, which is a tad annoying, but the tradeoff is water resistance and a degree of slash proofing. Not that I expect (or recommend) many of you will try to take a pair of scissors to your laptop bag, but putting a blade across the surface of this bag left no real damage, which is impressive.
The interior is heavily cushioned, too, which should provide a high degree of shock resistance should you drop or nudge your Surface Book 2 off a desk. The interior perimeter lining is also coated in a thicker layer of material, which should go even further to protect the device if the bag lands edge-first after a fall. The exterior, too, has a roll of canvas around the upper and lower corners, making for further impact protection without impeding the visual quality of the bag. The attention to detail here is great.
The HEX Recon sleeve also sports two zippers, which allows you to position the gap wherever you want, for those who might want to use a charge cable without removing it from the sleeve, for example.
One annoying issue I've found with other tablet sleeves not designed specifically for Surface is that the bags can often unintentionally power-on the device, since the on-switch is almost always positioned at the top of the device. Thankfully, owing to the inner rolls that leave a gap between the top of the device and the zip, there's plenty of room for the power button to not become accidentally triggered, leading to hot-laptop-bag syndrome.
A great (but seemingly rare) product
The HEX Recon sleeve is part of a large line of tablet and laptop sleeves for all sorts of products. However, this specific one, made of charcoal-colored canvas, appears to be quite hard to find. I purchased it for 35 euros from Amazon Germany, and similar HEX products sell for around the same amount of dollars, or less, on Amazon US. This HEX charcoal bag, which looks rather similar, is on sale for $19.99 as of writing, but it's hard to tell whether it's the same product. There are a range of similar 15-inch products on HEX's website, but it looks as though they might make some of these products in limited quantities. I expect all of their bags carry the same level of quality and style as this though, so it's well worth exploring their other 13-inch and 15-inch sleeves if you're in the market for a Surface Book case.
