Osprey Ozone Laptop Backpack Review

The Osprey Ozone Laptop Backpack sits in a pretty interesting niche when it comes to use. As its name implies, it’s a backpack designed to help you travel with your laptop. However, unlike most laptop backpacks designed for daily commutes, the Ozone is pegged for longer trips. In other words, it’s a travel backpack and a laptop bag.

Spoiler alert: it nails the basic features we like in a laptop backpack, so we turned our attention to other aspects of the bag, specifically the bag’s structure. Though its solid-looking front is promising, the flexible mid-section affects how the bag packs and how it feels to carry.

External Components

Osprey’s bags tend to exhibit the brand’s design language very strongly—which is the most polite way to say they all usually look very, very similar. For example, you can take a daypack like the Centauri, place it beside the Nova, and immediately see the resemblance. With the Ozone, though, they’ve done a good job branching out from the family tree without looking too foreign.

The panel layout helps the front look more composed, solid, and geometrical. If this looks familiar, it may remind you of NOMATIC’s designs, which we like aesthetically for their slick look. Osprey made the right choice here since we think many of their bags in this size range look very busy and cluttered (just like in the aforementioned Nova); this looks more minimalist by contrast.

Their materials are quite intriguing as well. Their choices are usually solid, such as nylon dobby and packcloth, and we’ve generally had no problems with those in the long term. For the Ozone, though, the fabrics feel generally lighter, possibly due to the notably light denier—primarily 100-denier recycled NanoFly nylon with a DWR coating, with a 210-denier recycled nylon on the bottom.

No matter how you slice it, these are comparatively thin, unlike the 1680-denier ballistic nylon monsters we see on other travel bags. To be clear, denier count isn’t the sole factor in what makes a bag light, but it’s definitely one of them. However, we don’t think this makes Ozone flimsy by any means.

The fabrics have remained more or less pristine throughout testing, with the most egregious damage from a small chewing incident involving a cat and the heat-shrink on the Ozone’s zipper pulls. On that note, the Ozone uses reliable YKK zippers throughout. Some appear to be AquaGuard types, but their rubbery tracks don’t feel very stiff, making them easier to unzip while remaining water-resistant.

All in all, the Ozone has the good build quality we’ve come to expect from Osprey. That said, although the durability is solid, the lightweight fabrics make the midsection feel floppy. This has implications in both carrying feel and how easy it is to pack, which we’ll elaborate on in the following sections.

Up at the top is a thick, soft-padded handle. Osprey typically doesn’t skimp on padding when it comes to top grab handles like these, so this doesn’t surprise us. More interesting is the Travel Sentry Luggage ID attached to the side. The idea is that you register your contact information to the TSID website, and whoever finds this tag and scans the QR code can find you in case the bag gets lost and found. We’ve seen similar features with other brands, and it can be quite handy if you’re not already using a smart tracker.

Osprey really doubles down on the lightness factor with the harness system. The back panel features their AirScape back panel (fancy marketing speak for a perforated and mesh design), and you even see some of that trickle down to the shoulder straps. Needless to say, heat buildup around these areas isn’t much of an issue. More to the point, you can tell how light the straps are just by moving them around.

Admittedly, the collared design made us a bit skeptical at first, but it’s relatively shallow, so most users probably won’t feel it scrape around the neck. Additional features include complimentary loops on each strap, where we usually hang small accessories like keychains, and a sliding sternum strap with a built-in whistle.

Should your shoulders get tired (and you just so happen to be traveling with roller luggage), the back panel’s bottom half doubles as a pass-through. There’s also a nifty hidden security pocket, but we’ll leave that for the last section of the review.

Fit Notes

Though the Ozone lacks extras like a hip belt or load lifter, the lightweight shoulder straps handle a fully packed weight competently. The sternum strap, in particular, pulls a significant amount of the weight forward, which is especially crucial for the Ozone because of its saggy midsection.

While the sagginess is noticeable, it’s far from catastrophic, and we’ve definitely seen worse. Having most of the structure at the front and back does enough to keep the bag’s load close and center. However, we can’t help but imagine how better the carry could be if the midsection were similarly structured. We’re not bag engineers, though, so we’ll leave the thought exercise for more qualified experts.

Inside The Backpack

First up are the water bottle pockets—yep, plural because you get two of them. Seems trivial, right? But we have seen travel-focused backpacks ditch one for an extra handle at the side, which is fair for people who want more than one way to carry their bag by hand. Osprey gives the Ozone both, flanking the bag with water bottle pockets while placing a thin grab handle along the edge of the back panel. Yes, the handle’s simplicity makes it seem like an afterthought, but this is a blessing for those who want to double up on hydration. Alternatively, you can use one pocket for your bottle and the other to hold a travel tripod or a folding umbrella. Either way, we dig having the option.

As for the water bottle pockets themselves, the stretchy mesh material is nothing fancy, but it’s fairly secure. We use them to keep 18-ounce travel water bottles in place from time to time. Slender bottles like those tend to slip out if the elastics don’t have enough grip; this is not the case with the Ozone’s pockets.

We return to the back panel to check out that hidden security pocket. A pocket like this is a feature that truly separates travel-focused bags from their daypack counterparts. See, for longer trips to faraway places where you may carry sensitive documents (passports, tickets, multiple credit cards, etc.), you’ll want a hard-to-reach and secure pocket like this. The only downside is that there’s little to no space here for anything bulky, just those items that are all mostly flat and small.

Next up is the top quick-grab pocket. Opening this pocket should be straightforward: unzip the AquaGuard-style zippers and use the pull tabs at the sides to make it easier. However, because of the soft Ozone midsection, the area around the pocket tends to collapse in on itself. So, apart from using those pull tabs, you’ll have to straighten out the front and back areas around the pocket to make opening it easier.

Inside is a relatively bright white liner. More importantly, it’s soft to the touch, meaning you can toss in easily scratched items like sunglasses and lenses without worrying too much. That said, it’s all moot if you also put a set of keys alongside it, but stick with us because there’s another place to connect your keys. There are no additional dividers or pockets inside, but that’s okay. If it’s organization you’re looking for, then let’s head over to the admin panel.

That’s the frontmost compartment, in case you’re wondering. It opens in a horseshoe shape, revealing a mix of zippered and open pockets waiting to be filled: a wide zippered pocket at the back; two mesh pockets, one with a short key leash; and two pen slots on the far right side. It’s a modest layout, so we still recommend supplementing it with your own tech pouch if you bring a bunch of accessories for your laptop. And to be fair, this compartment has a ton of space to pack one or two of those. In fact, we’d go as far as to say packing this compartment all the way to the bottom is beneficial because it gains a ton of structure, thus helping tame the otherwise floppy midsection.

Towards the back of the Ozone is the laptop compartment. It has a sleeve that fits up to a 16-inch laptop, padding on both sides of the compartment—and that’s really it for visible features. There are no additional pockets, latches, cable pass-throughs, or anything fancy like that. It almost feels lacking for a bag explicitly called a laptop backpack. However, there is ample space inside for large and flat accessories like a travel keyboard, a slim cooling pad, or even a foldable stand. Above all, though, the sleeve is suspended about five inches from the base to help absorb impacts from the bottom. That is a sizable false bottom for a bag of this size, and it’s very reassuring to see for protection.

Finally, we arrive at the main compartment. It’s anticlimactic how plain and featureless it is inside. At most, we’d point to the relatively bright liner Osprey’s elected to use here. They get plus points for that since this helps see what you’re trying to take out much easier, even under poor lighting. On the plus side, there is a ton of space for packing cubes and pouches inside—and you’ll want to utilize those just to keep gear organized.

The main issue here is accessibility. Unlike other travel backpacks that you can fully open like a clamshell, the Ozone’s horseshoe-shaped opening frequently collapses because of the soft midsection. Case in point, it sags down when the bag is laid on its back, obscuring the main compartment’s interior and making it hard to pack.