We love a travel gadget - whether they make your trip run more smoothly is debatable, but they look good and they often help you make new friends, which can never be a bad thing.
Here are our top five picks or this summer.
Wikitude – Android, Apple iOS, Blackberry, Windows Phone 7, Symbian and others.
This is a one stop shop for local information, on the ground. Follow your nose around a new city – you just need to point your phone’s camera in the direction of where you want to go, and using a super-trendy ‘Augmented Reality’, information appears hovering over the locations on your screen.
Find out about venues and events, access Wikipedia articles and tweets, along with lots of user generated content from other travellers who have left their own reviews and guides. It’s also integrated with Hotels.com, TripAdvisor, Yelp and Qype, so it can help you find a place to stay or somewhere to eat. It’s searchable too, so you can use it to get directions to ‘Italian restaurants’, for example.
Eye-Scope for iPhone
Love your iPhone’s camera, but miss having a zoom lens? This pocket-sized 8x zoom lens isn’t just a gimmicky toy – the Eye-Scope has been praised for its great quality results as well as its geek-chic looks. It comes with a mini-tripod to help steady your shot - helpful if you’re using Timer to get yourself in the picture, or if you’re taking pictures at night.
Belkin Rockstar headphone splitter:
You and your travelling companions can enjoy your own private silent disco with this headphone splitter – and if you’ve got a car full of kids, we’d go so far as to say it’s a travel essential, as it allows them to watch DVDs on the move or share music.
That's hours of entertainment to provide you with some much needed peace and quiet (especially if you have to concentrate on your satnav to help you navigate those foreign roads!) Check out the reviews for this little beauty on Amazon.
Kindle Touch:
We hardly need to tell you about the benefits of taking an e-reader on holiday; why carry two or three paperbacks to while away your hours on the beach when you can take one lightweight e-reader in your hand luggage?
This bestselling Kindle is one of the best on the market.
Scalado Remove:
Ever have a great holiday photo ruined by hordes of tourists lumbering around in the background? Now you can erase them from your pictures with this simple app.
You take multiple pictures in quick succession, and the technology merges the images, allowing you to choose which moving objects to delete from the final shot – such as wandering tourists or bikes whizzing past. Perfect.
Get rid of those background voyeurs here.
Image credits: Facebook, with thanks to Scalado, Kindle Publishing, Belkin, Amazon and Wikitude.