If you'd asked me that a couple of years ago, I would have said very little. I spent twenty years as a television reporter, mainly covering business, and while I was surrounded by technology on the road - from camera crews, to satellite trucks and mobile editing - very little of it was under my control.

But in the last couple of years I've become a multimedia technology journalist and it has become imperative for me to have a lot more gadgets about me - to keep in touch, do my job outside the office, and simply for the hell of it. After all, my cynical colleagues in the BBC's Economics Unit keep asking me when I am going to stop playing around with mobile phones and social networks and get a proper job, so I might as well play up to the stereotype.

For me, the most important gadgets have been those that allow me to get online anywhere and everywhere. First I have two mobile phones which give me permanent access to my email - one for my corporate messages, another which picks up my personal email.

Over the last eighteen months, I've taken a laptop with me just about anywhere. For a while that could only get online when I was in reach of a wifi network, which is still surprisingly difficult to find in many places. But now I've acquired a mobile broadband dongle which fills in some of the gaps, though again there are plenty of areas without the 3g coverage needed to get online.

Along with two phones and a laptop, my kitbag also contains a small, very simple video camera, good enough to capture pictures if there's no professional camera crew with me, but not really fit (in my hands at least) for proper broadcasting. I also have a digital audio recorder for radio work, and my most exciting new gadget, a digital pen which records conversations and matches the recordings to my scribblings in a notebook.

As well as simply communicating with the office and scanning various internet feeds, I'm using a whole range of applications on the road. There is Qik, which allows you to broadcast almiost live from a mobile phone, or AudioBoo, which allows you to record and upload audio very efficiently. Both of these are interesting new tools which still have to prove their value for professional broadcasting.

I am more inclined to turn to Flickr, a photo-sharing website, as an easy way to get images to editors at BBC TV Centre. On my laptop I have some free software called Audacity which allows me to top and tail a piece of audio, which I can then send to London using a marvellous browser-based service which the BBC set up a few years back. And I'm making possibly excessive use of Twitter - I'm ruskin147 by the way - to promote my work, to get early warnings of any breaking stories in my field, and to appeal for information.

All this connectivity does, however, have its downside. I spend a lot of time when I'm out reading and deleting emails or checking out my various social networks. Sometimes I wonder whether I would be better off turning off the phones and getting out a book.

The result of all this technology is that I can, in theory, do a lot of my work away from the office, without the co-operation of colleagues. But somehow it doesn't quite work like that. I still find you need to look your boss in the eye from time to time - and gossip with the rest of the office. Even if the only question they want to ask me is how to work their shiny new mobile phones and which browser I would recommend.

Rory Cellan-Jones is Technology Correspondent, BBC News