New Consumer Electronics That Could Shape The Way You Travel

The shifting field of consumer technology isn't always fertile ground for travelers. There are plenty of toys that might be fun to own, or break-the-bank gadgets that look good in your hand, but few that stand a chance of truly making traveling easier, cheaper, or better.

Frommer's searched through millions of square feet of displays at the annual mega-convention known as the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas to find the new crop of creations that is most likely to help you travel better. Some are on sale already, some are about to hit the market, but all of them are reasonably priced and solve problems that travelers need to solve.

The communications app Glide is gaining favor among young people (and investors) by working like Voxer for video clips. (And Voxer, for the uninitiated, works like a walkie-talkie on your smartphone—you talk and send the message, then they respond and send that back.) It's pretty simple: You record a video message and send it to your friends the same way you would send a text message. That's ideal for sending video postcards during a trip, especially from places where the signal is spotty and FaceTime or Skype video would be too jumpy. The videos are stored on the Cloud, not your phone, leaving room for vacation photos of your own. You'll be seeing a lot more of Glide, partly because investors are putting muscle behind it to head off competition. Although its estimated base of 1 million active users mostly uses Glide on smartphones, the Israeli company is also writing apps for the incoming batch of smartwatches (above). Pretty soon, we could all be reporting back to our families during our trips like Maxwell Smart did on his missions.

www.glide.me

If you're traveling with friends or family where you don't have mobile phone service (say, to another country, on a cruise, or on a backwoods trails) or where phone service is hopelessly jammed (say, a theme park or a festival), if each of you carries this device, you can use your smartphones to text each other anyway. Naturally, they're sold in pairs ($149 for two).

www.gotenna.com

All of a sudden, the market is brimming with $25 chips the size of a Kennedy half-dollar that you can slip into whatever you like to track its whereabouts using a map on a smartphone. Push a button on your app, and it makes noises so you can find it. There's a catch to most of these, besides batteries that need constant replacing after six months or so: Most of them can only communicate with your phone up to about 100 to 165 feet, and after that, tracking them gets complicated: You can only locate them if someone else who purchased the same product wanders past with their own smartphone, giving your item a chance to register and alert you (TrackR's website has a heat map of where its customers are). Naturally, the more people who buy them, the more chance you have of rediscovery. The most obvious application is with your luggage, although it's sure to wander more than 150 feet away after an airport check-in and even if it did go missing, you'd be helpless to do much about it. But you can also tape one into your passport, pop it into your purse, or stick it into anything that you fear will get lost, except your wits. Three of the most promising beacons are from XY Find It (above), TrackR, and Tile. Maybe to maximize the chance of finding your lost stuff, you should buy all three. (Or maybe customers can convince the three competitors to link their systems.)

The strength of the sun varies widely depending on where you are. An hour in the sun in England may leave you whiter than you were before while and hour in the sun in Australia can turn you into a charcoal briquette. This $50 waterproof UVA monitor keeps track of how much exposure you've endured so you don't have to guess. The 11 LED lights illuminate their way around the dial until you reach your personal maximum, and then it flashes to tell you to seek cover or to apply something opaque, such as tin foil.

Going away for only a few days? You can use this $250 robot feeder to dispense dry pet food remotely using your smartphone, or you can use it to program an automated schedule (a separate water feeder is in the works). No pet will be able to unscrew the reservoir unless it has evolved opposable thumbs, and the unit has a low center of gravity to avert tipping. You'll receive confirmation that the meal was dispensed, if the unit jams, or if you're running low—you even are told how many calories your pet has received and how many it ought to be consuming for its weight, age, and activity level. So when you're back home from your weekend away, you can use it to put your furry creature on a diet—or maybe yourself, if you fill it with granola.

For the pet owner who has everything (except the time to show personal affection), this little box surveys a room while you're away. Using a smartphone or a device, you watch your animal live via 138 degrees of streaming video and see for yourself how little they care when you're not home. You can also find out for sure which one of your dogs is the garbage-eating culprit. Using a speaker, you can call to your animal using your smartphone (both iOS and Android) and confuse the heck out of them, but if you really want to mess with them, there's a built-in laser pointer that will shine a red light anyplace in the room by touching the livestream on the video. It drives cats insane. Think of this $200 invention as being for the weekend traveler who loves their pet enough to buy the very best—or at least the very best frivolous electronics for themselves.

www.petcube.com