Portable

Portable may refer to:

  • Portable building, a manufactured structure that is built off site and moved in upon completion of site and utility work
  • Portable classroom, a temporary building installed on the grounds of a school to provide additional classroom space where there is a shortage of capacity
  • Portable toilet, a modern, portable, self-contained outhouse manufactured of molded plastic

In computing:

  • Portable object (computing), a distributed computing term for an object which can be accessed through a normal method call while possibly residing in memory on another computer
  • Software portability, software that can easily be ported to multiple platforms
  • Portable applications, applications that do not require any kind of installation onto a computer, and can store data in the program's directory

In electronics:

  • Portable electronics
  • Portable communications device, a wearable or handheld device
  • Portable audio player, a personal electronic device that allows the user to listen to recorded or broadcast audio whilst being mobile
  • Portable computer, a computer that is designed to be moved from one place to another
    • Compaq Portable series (1982–?)
    • Apricot Portable (1984)
    • IBM Portable Personal Computer (1984)
    • Macintosh Portable (1989–1991) from Apple Computer
  • Handheld game console, a lightweight, portable electronic machine for playing video games

In music:

  • Portable Life, a 1999 album by Danielle Brisebois
  • Portable Sounds a 2007 album by TobyMac.

Famous quotes containing the word portable:

    Fewer and fewer Americans possess objects that have a patina, old furniture, grandparents’ pots and pans—the used things, warm with generations of human touch, ... essential to a human landscape. Instead, we have our paper phantoms, transistorized landscapes. A featherweight portable museum.
    Susan Sontag (b. 1933)

    “Wotever is, is right, as the young nobleman sveetly remarked wen they put him down in the pension list ‘cos his mother’s uncle’s vife’s grandfather vunce lit the king’s pipe vith a portable tinder-box.”
    Charles Dickens (1812–1870)

    In the quilts I had found good objects—hospitable, warm, with soft edges yet resistant, with boundaries yet suggesting a continuous safe expanse, a field that could be bundled, a bundle that could be unfurled, portable equipment, light, washable, long-lasting, colorful, versatile, functional and ornamental, private and universal, mine and thine.
    Radka Donnell-Vogt, U.S. quiltmaker. As quoted in Lives and Works, by Lynn F. Miller and Sally S. Swenson (1981)