The best holiday and travel tech: Enhance your galavanting with these essential gadgets
Bluesmart One
Suitcase technology seemed to grind to a halt shortly after we stuck wheels on them, but Bluesmart has just booted your luggage into the 21st century. The Bluesmart One suitcase has global GPS tracking thanks to a built-in SIM card, a battery charger for your devices, can tell you how heavy it currently is and auto-locks itself if it ever leaves your side. It’s also a magnificent travel case without all the techno-gubbins, ultra-sturdy with a reinforced laptop compartment. Now when an airline sends your luggage the wrong way around the world, you’ll at least know which city it’s ended up in. £349, bluesmart.com
Bose QC35 Noise-Cancelling Headphones
Active noise-cancelling headphones cocoon your ears in a beautiful, soundless embrace, cutting out most of the engine drone of long haul flights and lulling you to sleepytown with their comforting, womb-like serenity. Once you’ve travelled with them you’ll struggle to go back. The most popular are the Bose QC25s – as evidenced by absolutely everybody in the world owning a pair – and the new wireless QC35 model now includes the same magical noise-quashing ability of the wired version. If you love sound and hate noise, you need these all over your ears. £289.95, bose.co.uk
Zendure Gen A5 Portable Charger
Portable chargers are a dime a dozen and many of them are cheap and unreliable, but the Zendure A5 is one of the sturdiest and most dependable juice packs around. Tough enough to survive being reversed over by your rental car, it can easily withstand a journey rattling around inside your suitcase. Its auto-on feature means it’ll only power up whenever something’s plugged into it and it will hold on to most of its charge even after six months of storage. Ideal for chucking it in a glovebox and forgetting about it. £94.99, zendure.com
Sony SRS-X11
Looking like something out of Minecraft, the Sony SRS-X11 is a chic, ultra-compact and cube-shaped Bluetooth speaker with a remarkable amount of boomphity-boomph for its tiny stature. Equally impressive is just how many features Sony has crammed into this little noise-box: NFC pairing, wired support, and the ability to pair it up with other SRS-X11s for stereo playback. Most excitingly however, it comes with a little strap so you can dangle it from any nearby hooks. An essential camping companion. £69, sony.co.uk
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TrackR Bravo
Stick these TrackR tags to your most eminently losable belongings and the accompanying phone app will monitor its whereabouts within Bluetooth range. Drop your keys on the beach and your phone can tell you where it last saw them, like a helpful sniffer dog who lives in your pocket. You can even use your phone to make the tag emit a high-pitched alarm, and if you lose your phone (come on man, stop losing things), the tag can be pressed to make it ring out. £24.99, thetrackr.com
Garmin Dash Cam 35
Drivers are constantly bearing witness to strange and wonderful things through the windscreen – meteorites, bears, strange birds, insurance fraud, ghosts, the list goes on – and the recent surge in the use of dashcams has brought these unlikely sightings to the masses. But as well as providing material for YouTube compilations, the Garmin Dash Cam 35 has a serious set of safety features built in. Collision detection immediately saves the critical seconds of video leading up to an incident, while a proximity sensor will warn you if you’re driving too closely to the car in front. An invaluable tool should the worst happen on your road trip. £159, buy.garmin.com
Amazon Kindle Oasis
Not only is the Oasis the finest e-reader in the Kindle range, but it’s also thin enough to use as a makeshift spade if your beach reading is interrupted by an aggressive troupe of competitive sandcastle builders. At £269 it’s probably not something you’d like to scoop sand with, but its capacity to hold more books than you could ever hope to read on a single trip, coupled with its ultra-refined ergonomic design, make the Oasis an indispensable travel companion for the word-hungry tourist. £269, amazon.co.uk