Stuff summer essentials: The best travel tech for connecting
Upgrade your getaway with these on-the-go gadgets
STAY CONNECTED
Remember the good old days, when in-flight entertainment was limited to an airline magazine and the closest you got to noise-cancelling was two pieces of cotton wool? No? Probably because those days were rubbish. Travel might be a tonic for the soul, but without the right tech it’s just a whole lot of moving around with bags. Thankfully, we’ve trawled the tech aisles for those travel essentials that will give your summer getaway the upgrade it deserves. So, here are a handful of gadgets that’ll help you stay connected when you’re half the world away.
LACIE RUGGED MINI
Remember that time you made the greatest ever apartment on The Sims, only for the save to fail and your masterpiece to disappear with a ‘Dag Dag’? Losing your holiday photos is like that, only 43 times worse. Don’t take the risk: bag yourself a LaCie backup drive for rugged picture protection. This 1TB model plays nicely with USB-C laptops and ships with a two-year data recovery plan. If you’ve got the readies, there’s also the new Rugged Raid Pro – a fast, hardy drive with an in-built SD card reader.
NOMAD UNIVERSAL CABLE
Cables: a necessary evil. And when it comes to packing, they’re arguably the hardest thing to master. Do you loop them together? Leave them in a loose heap? Stuff them in a shoe? However you choose to stow them, there’s a good chance they’ll have tangled themselves into a bundle of frustration by the time you arrive. Unless you buy this universal cable, that is: clad in a tear-resistant coating, it can do micro USB, USB-C and Lightning duties, and a handy tie-strap means it won’t make friends with your shoelaces in the suitcase.
TP-LINK M7350
Roaming rates might be tumbling but for far-flung forays it’s still cheaper to buy a local SIM and live the data dream. Pop one in this 4G hotspot from TP-Link and you’ll be streaming before you’ve reached the arrivals lounge. Capable of speeds up to 150mbps, its party trick is supporting up to 15 devices at once – so the whole family can join the bandwidth battle at the beach. And with a battery life of 10 hours, they’ll be at it all day long. Bliss.
RYZE TELLO
What, a drone isn’t a travel essential? Come back once you’re Instagram famous. Aerial holiday shots are where it’s at – and, short of strapping your smartphone to a helium balloon and hoping for the best, sending a pocket flyer up to pap your poolside situation is the quickest ticket to an upgraded Insta feed. This dinky drone isn’t the most advanced around, but it’s unbeatable at the price and image quality is plenty good enough for some #wanderlust.
GL-AR150 MINI TRAVEL ROUTER
Paranoid that the authorities are monitoring your YouTube usage? This pocket router makes your binge-watching more secure by creating a private Wi-Fi connection from public hotspots, so you can feel safe watching back-to-back Zoella episodes while you sip your macchiato. It ships with OpenVPN pre-installed, too, in case you’re really that worried about your vlogger habit going public.
