Heys Travelmate Sling Bag

Heys is a travel gear and luggage company best known for its very hard but lightweight rolling suitcases---those colorful ones you see whizzing by you in the airport. But they also make a lot of practical travel accessories and bags that aren't hard-sided, including this cool little Travelmate bag that slings over your shoulder.

Think of it as a miniature daypack, a travel purse, a hands-free travel carrier for dads, or a man purse, but the idea is that you can stow what you need in a small bag that doesn't get in the way. It's smaller than a backpack or messenger bag, but large enough to hold the essentials. In my test I managed to fit in the following: trade paperback, notebook, camera, passport, snacks, cell phone, pens, lip balm, and my Chargepod. There's a zippered mesh pocket on the side that will hold a small water bottle.

The Heys Travelmate stays snug against your body so your hands are free---especially helpful if you're trying to keep track of a toddler or push a stroller. If you're not traveling on business and you're on an airline that doesn't sock you for baggage fees, you could check your suitcase and complete the whole trip with just this bag. Then on the other end, it would do the trick for your days of sightseeing.

I have no complaints about the bag itself: it's rugged, well-made, and has lots of pockets for keeping things separated, including one on the front that's handy for things you need to get at often, like money and an ID. The flap on the front is attached with velcro, so you can open it with one hand. One inside pocket is clear and waterproof: handy if you're carrying cosmetics that could leak.

Two of the three accessories that come with it are a different story though and should have just been left out. There's a cheap LED flashlight that was already dead in the model I received and a mirror that's about as clear as a piece of tin foil. The included travel wallet is nice though: the kind that hangs around your neck and goes under your shirt---handy in places where pickpockets could be working the crowd. (The bag itself would be pretty hard to snatch too; it would have to be slashed.)

The regular line of Heys Travelmate bags includes models in 14 different colors, from subdued to very bright. There's also an "exotic" line with zebra and leopard prints or the houndstooth one pictured here. Some of the shades and patterns are too feminine for guys, but there's plenty to choose from.

These bags generally retail for $23 to $30, so they're a good value. They're available in some retail luggage stores. Find out more online or go shopping:

Heys Canada
Heys USA

Solid colors at Amazon
Exotic line at Amazon

Portable iPod Speakers that Really Crank

I've tried out quite a few portable speaker contraptions for an iPod or MP3 player and most of them weren't even worth mentioning on here, especially when it came to sound quality. The Altec Lansing Orbit speaker is pretty decent and is easy to pack, but with only one speaker you're obviously not getting stereo sound.

This iHome2go IH13 combination water-resistant case and speakers is better than most because it has real speakers that crank out the sound. Real bass! Real cymbals crashing! It sounds as good as most computer speakers in a small room and pumps out enough volume to fill a big living room or work for a backyard barbecue.

Plus the design is pretty inventive. Basically this is a zippered case that keeps your iPod dry (there's a special foam encasement for the Nano) and you can control volume and track forward/backward on the front of the case without opening it. It comes with a strap allowing you to carry it and there's a connection cord for non-Apple music players.

There's one big drawback however: weight. This puppy is heavy, as in barely less then two pounds. If you're hopping into a car or stuffing a light rolling suitcase full of clothes it might not matter, but if you're a backpacker or a carry-on traveler, that might provoke some serious pondering. The other drawback is that this is a wasteful, 4-AA-battery-sucking, landfill-soiling machine the way it comes packaged. It's $40, which is certainly a fair value, but then you find out the AC adapter is $22. Seriously! The adapter is more than half as much as the whole damn stereo system. There's a combination package on their website for $50, but only in pink or green camouflage. For the Army men and women I guess...

No problem though. The connection on the back is (for once) the same one used by most standard electrical devices with an adapter, such as that cordless phone you have in the basement, so just dig up another adapter and spend $22 on iTunes instead. When the AC adapter is plugged in, your iPod will charge as well. There's a warning in the instructions that you must use their adapter, but last time I checked they all let through the same voltage.

The iHome IH13 portable speaker system is anywhere from $32 to $40 at retail depending on where you get it, including at Amazon. I got mine by trading in some "No Hassle Miles" from my Capital One credit card though, so look for it in whatever mileage/points program you use.

Rocking iPhone/iPod Devices for your Home, Office & More at iHome!

Cute Portable Digital Picture Frame From Royal

Bring your favorite pictures along for ten bucks or less!

Over the years, as a traveling dad, I have found it extremely useful to pack plenty of diversions for the kid or kids tagging along. I haven't sprung for a Sony PSP or a Nintendo DS because I know how addictive they can be even for adults. But I share my iPod classic with my daughter so she can watch cartoons and listen to her favorite tunes. And often I'll pick up a cheap gadget to bring on a trip, something that has the flash of the new.

This little 1.4-inch digital picture frame from Royal is a toy in terms of specs, but at a retail price of $7 to $10, it's a great value. My daughter loves it and she can't wait to hook it onto her backpack the next time we take off, bringing photos of all her friends and grandparents along for the ride.

Set-up was dead easy. There's a mini CD that installs the program on your computer. Then you plug in the device, select the photos you want, and sync it up. The photo frame gets the time and date from your computer and charges up via the USB cord. Your photo library is presented in the software in the normal folder system. When you select a photo the software puts a cropping box over it (which you can move around) to size it for this device. In other words, you get the faces, not a shrunken version of the entire photo.

The picture quality is not going to win any awards, but it's pretty good for the price. You can scroll through the pictures manually, or just sit back and let it go in slideshow mode. After a period of inactivity it shuts off by itself. Thankfully Royal resisted the urge to add a bunch of useless features to it, but there is an alarm clock, so I guess this qualifies as a double-duty item for packing light. The clip also doubles as a stand.

There aren't a lot of good travel gadgets that will cost you an Alexander Hamilton or less. This is one that delivers.

Get the Royal PF140 Digital Photo Frame at Overstock.com

Get it at Amazon

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CVS Picture DVD Slide Show

CVS has installed some cool Kodak kiosks in their stores to get your megabytes of photo data onto something more permanent than your Facebook page. I tried one of them out this week and turned out a DVD that's pretty darn cool. It took 60 of my photos (the max) from two vacations with my family and made a DVD with motion and music. Not bad for $12.99, especially considering the almost-instant gratification.

You can bring in your photos on a media card, on a burned CD, or on a USB thumb drive. The machine reads your photos and you then decide which ones to use and in what order. You make choices just by touching the screen and dragging things around. Then you give it a title, select which song you want as background, and hit "burn." Then you wander around the store looking at painkillers, condoms, and chocolates while it does its thing. (10 minutes in my case)

The music choices on the one I used were limited to 16, but for most people that's enough to find something that will work. The Isley Brothers, Willie Nelson, and KC and the Sunshine Band may not be current, but they're pretty good accompaniment for this kind of thing. Then the photos zoom and pan their way through to provide movement the whole time. When the combination ran on my average TV at home, it looked great.

I'm sure you can do the same thing yourself at home if you're willing to play around with your Mac all day, but since the price of this equates to about 20 minutes of my time, screw that.

I hit a few snags though. The CVS closest to my house didn't have the right machine yet. One machine at the second location I tried gave me an error message just as I was finishing and I had to start over on the one next to it while a clerk rebooted. As you would expect for the wages they get, the clerks aren't exactly tech wizards when something goes wrong either. But as long as you're not cutting it too close on your schedule, you should be okay.

Overall, this is a nice way to preserve your travel photos from one trip or to group a bunch of them together by theme. It offers you a way to show pics to friends and relatives later in the comfort of a living room or to send a neat gift off to someone who was along with you.

Epson's Artisan 700 Printer for Photos and Docs

In these days when contract manufacturers in Asia are building almost everything electronic, you would think brands don't matter much. But when it comes to printers, Epson seems to always have the edge for models that handle photos well. I just got a confirmation of that when trying out a new Artisan 700 3-in-1 printer from Epson.

First of all, man have these printers come down in price. A few years ago I paid around $320 for a highly rated Canon one, then my last one with even more features was $160 online last year. This Epson model lists for $249, but even the Epson site sells it for less and you can routinely find it for close to $150 on sale. Of course part of this is the razor blade model: don't charge so much for the printer, but soak everyone badly on the ink. This Artisan line uses six, yes SIX ink cartridges, so you'll be spending a pretty penny if you run off hundreds of photos on a routine basis.

If you're like me though, you've got a thousand or two photos on your hard drive and it seems you rarely get around to printing them out. Sometimes you just want one or two of them and you don't want to pop by Wal-mart or put in an order through Kodak Gallery just for that. So it's helpful to have a printer in the house that can do the job well.

Earlier I reviewed Epson's PictureMate model, which is dead simple and handy for just doing 4 X 6 prints. This one is a different story. There are more features than I'll ever get a hang of, but in short it will print any size photo up to 8.5 X 11, will print a few on one page, will print out picture CDs you've burned, and will work as a regular printer and scanner. Furthermore, it does all this through a network and wirelessly as well.

It took me a few dud photos to realize I needed to tweak the printer settings each time I did a new task, but once I figured that out I ended up with photos that were really close to what I get from a commercial printing service. Suitable for framing. It seamlessly hooked up to my network and printed out photos from a computer on the other side of the house. It printed others from my wireless laptop. (I just had to install the drivers.) The printed CDs were the only disappointment. They look fine, but you can just print a picture onto them---no ability to add a track listing for music, or even a title, unless you're able to create all that in Photoshop beforehand and save it as a file. It's a whole lot faster to just break down and use a Sharpie.

I compared the pics to what comes out of my 4-cartridge Canon Pixma and must admit those other two cartridges do seem to help: my Canon shots weren't as accurate or crisp. They took longer to print too.

The scanning, copying, and document printing have been going fine too in my tests, so this is a great workhorse printer that can do almost everything you need done, without taking up a lot of space. It even prints on both sides of the paper if you want and with a two-year warranty, you should be set for a while. With this as your home printer, you can get some of those photos out of the virtual world and into the real one. See more features at the Epson site.

Get it at Amazon

Luggage Tags and Handle Wraps from Travel Chic

This travel gear blog has been quiet the past week because I have been...traveling! A real vacation, chillin' with the relatives, stuffing myself, and not doing any work. It involved some flying, which means picking out our bags among a sea of suitcases on the luggage carousel. My daughter didn't have any problem spotting hers from far away: her suitcase was adorned with a luggage tag and handle wrap set from Travel Chic.

Travel Chic specializes in hip and fashionable accessories that help you find your bag in a hurry, without resorting to an ugly piece of colored tape or a ribbon tied around the handle. When Travel Chic offered to send a sample to try out, my little one went for the pink ensemble pictured here (because you can never have enough pink apparently). There are a whole lot of colors and styles to pick from, however, from the wild and flashy to the elegant and restrained. There's also a kids' line--see the example at the bottom.

You can order the luggage tags by themselves for $16 or get one of the reversible handle wraps for $14. Or order a matching set for $27 and save a few bucks while getting coordinated.

The items are well-designed, attractive, and feel like they'll hold up to whatever the baggage handlers throw at them. If you're tired of sorting through identical black rolling bags as they come down the belt or you want to buy a nice gift for the frequent traveler on your list, one of these will look thoughtful without setting you back too much.


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Activetrax Travel Crank and Solar iPod Speaker

There are a lot of solar and crank radios out there now, which is a beautiful thing, but this little Activetrax cube from L.L. Bean goes beyond the rest in several ways. It's a speaker for any MP3 player, iPod, or phone. It's an AM/FM radio and a NOAA weather band radio with an extending antenna. It's about 2/3 the size of a Rubik's cube (3"L x 3½"H x 2¼"D), easily fitting into the palm of my hand or the corner of my backpack.

All well and good, but this is an off-the-grid electronic item that I've used for 12 hours without it coming near an electrical outlet. (There is an included A/C adapter for lazy people who want to charge it up before leaving home.) There's a small crank on the side that provides an hour of play time with only three minutes of cranking. Then there's a solar panel on the top that does even better. In my tests, an afternoon in the sun provided the full seven hours of play time.

The Activetrax comes with a carrying case that essentially doubles the size in order to accommodate the adapter, so if packing space is tight it's better to leave it at home. Otherwise, it's heavy-duty and comes with a carbiner to attach it to your bag or tent.

Alas, there's always a trade-off, and in this case it's the sound quality. It's okay, especially for the radio, but nothing like the sound you'll get from most powered MP3 speakers, like the Altec Lansing Orbit speaker I use a lot when I travel. Plus you need the included mono adapter to hear both channels from an MP3 player and the tiny and sensitive radio dial is hard to tune. For me though, it's worth it to have something I can use anywhere, without electrical adapters or batteries. It also gives me a lot of pleasure to use something so practical pulling nothing but green energy.

Most people know L.L. Bean for its quality outdoor clothing at a good price. They do carry some unique gear items too though. The new catalog has a cap with built-in tiny LED lights in the brim and several crank flashlights. Got to llbean.com/gear to see the line-up.

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Comfy TravelRest Travel Pillow

I always carried an inflatable travel pillow with me when I was backpacking around the world and there are times I still use one on a stingy airline with no pillows. There are basic flaws in the two main types though: the basic pillow-shaped ones and the C-shaped ones that go around your neck. Neither is all that flexible in terms of how you can use it and where it will fit when you're in a cramped coach seat.

I've been testing this new TravelRest inflatable pillow from HiGear Design and as is often the case, a slight change in outlook has made a huge difference. By reimagining the shape and design of a travel pillow, this company has turned out something that looks strange but works really well.

Deflated, it rolls up into a small and light package about the size of a pair of tube socks. A snap keeps it from unraveling. You can even snap it to the outside of your carry-on bag for easy removal on the plane.

Once you're ready to use it, a few puffs into the valve gets it ready. What you're holding looks like an oversized quotation mark, one that can be used in several ways. The attached cinch line allows the TravelRest pillow to attach to the back of your seat and stay in place when your head starts lolling around. You can snap the bottom of it to your seatbelt to keep it more secure. If you're stuck in the airport, you can just sling it over your shoulder, hug it like a Teddy bear, and snooze for a while during your delay. (Don't be surprised if you start dreaming of your childhood bedroom...)

This pillow is also handy in the car. It can attach to the headrest and seatbelt for a nice nap during a long car ride---especially good for kids who have to be stuck in a car seat for hours on end. It's easy to wash after someone drools on it too.

The TravelRest pillow lists for $27 and you can buy it direct from their site or in some luggage stores.

Portable Travel Bed for Babies

I almost never review something on this travel gear blog that I haven't used myself, but since my kid is 8 now and this is a bed for babies, well...

Friends of mine will soon have a new baby though and I've been looking around for a good travel-related present for them. I'm sold on this portable travel bed from Peapod. It's more of a tent than a bed, which makes it easier and lighter, plus it looks like it would be more fun for the tyke as well.

We used a pack-and-play set when my daughter was a baby, but it was really large and heavy. It just added to the incredible bulk of stuff you end up with when traveling with a little creature that only weighs ten pounds. This portable travel bed folds up to a manageable size (14"L x 5"W x 14"H) and it only weighs about 5 pounds for the smaller version.

There's a self-inflating (with a small included pump) air mattress at the bottom, lots of flaps to get to baby, and screens to let the air come through---just like a real tent. It comes in several colors and two basic sizes, so check the Peapod site to figure out which is best. Hint: if people commonly say to you, "Wow, that's a big baby," then you will probably want to go for the large one.

Almost anywhere you see customer reviews of this item, you see parents gushing about how great it is, so I feel very comfortable buying it sight unseen for my friends. You can find this portable travel bed for around $50-$70 at the likes of Target and Kohl's, or you can order it online from lots of outlets. Click here to get it at Amazon.

Casio Exilim EX-Z9 Digital Camera Review

I spent most of June traveling and I toted two cameras along: my usual 12X zoom Kodak Z612 and a new pocket camera I tried out for the first time, the Casio Exilim EX-Z9.

This Casio Exilim has a few drawbacks, but considering you can often find it on sale for around $130, it's a great value. It's small and ultra-slim (about half the size of my hand and less than an inch thick), easily fitting into a pocket without much of a protrusion. The LCD on the back is 2.6 inches, however, and looks good even when you're viewing shots in direct sunlight. The power button seems to have been shrunk proportionally though; I often had to try two or three times to turn the thing on or off and even my 7-year-old's fingers seemed too large for it. The other buttons are also teeny tiny and I usually had to resort to a fingernail to press what I wanted.

But what about the photos? Outdoors, especially for scenery, the shots were fan-fricking-tastic. Here's an example of a nice (unedited) shot of Moraine Lake in the Canadian Rockies. You could easily mistake that for something that came from a Nikon SLR.


It helps that the camera has built-in special situation modes you can select for scenery, night portraits, sports, candlelight, flowers, etc. (Accessed by the unfortunately named button labeled as "BS") There's also a handy mode that, after registering once, allows you to upload video to YouTube as soon as you plug into your computer, without actually visiting the site. That doesn't mean the video quality is any better than you usually get from a point and shoot camera, of course, especially when panning. To see a short clip I recorded with this camera, for the same area as the photo example here, check out the Moraine Lake Lodge video.

On the downside, shutter lag was a big problem--as it often is with cameras at this price point--and inside shots taken with a flash were really washed out, especially compared to what I get from the Kodak. Some were so overexposed in the normal automatic mode that they were just plain unusable. (The portrait mode fared a little better.) Also, the engineers were apparently loaded up on sake when they designed the charging system: the battery pack and bulky cord take up twice as much room in your pack as the camera itself and the connectors are not compatible with anything else you own, so you have to lug it all along to recharge the proprietary battery.

Overall though, this is a great little camera for the price, especially if you'll mostly be using it on weekend breaks instead of taking it on a long vacation where you'll need to cart along the recharging gear. The Casio Exilim EX-Z9 comes in pink, black, silver, or orange.

Search prices on the Casio Exilim EX-Z9

Keeping Track of Your Kid in a Crowd

It's kind of ironic, but most of the places you end up taking your kids on vacation are the places where it is easiest to lose them in a crowd: amusement parks, water parks, sports events, festivals, ski resorts, airports, and on and on. Add to that the fact that kids aren't opposed to just wandering off to follow the balloon man or someone dressed in a furry costume and it can be trouble.

Short of putting them on a leash (which makes me cringe when in see it), how do you keep the little ones from getting lost? And what about their stuff?

One company that has spent a lot of time on this question is Stuck on You. Their Stick with Me wristbands are better versions of the ones you get at an all-inclusive resort, with bright colors and kid-friendly icons (ladybugs, dinosaurs, flying saucers). They have a space for writing after "My name is" and another one after "If I am lost please call..." The idea is, you write the vitals, pop one on their wrist, and you've got some peace of mind if you get separated.
Stuck on You also helps you find your kids' bags, with colorful and fun luggage tags that your little ones will want to watch for on the carousel. Plus you can order matching stickers for their water bottle, and shoes. (Don't laugh--been to an indoor playground lately?) See more at the Stuck on You website.

I've also been trying out some Tattoos with a Purpose. These are kind of goofy---a temporary tattoo on your kid's arm that has a place for your cell phone number---but my daughter thought they were pretty cool. They come in all kinds of designs that will make the girls and the boys happy: dogs, rockets, butterflies, hearts, dinosaurs, and horses with pink manes. They're FDA-approved to no hurt any sensitive skin. They're also water resistant, so they'll work in a water park.

The pack of temporary tattoos comes with its own pen and some alcohol wipes for $10. See more at tattooswithapurpose.com.

Eco-friendly Sunscreen

If you're going snorkeling around sensitive coral reefs or swimming in cenotes, it is becoming clear that regular sunscreen is a big no-no. It's harmful to the marine life and may kill the coral, according to this National Geographic article.

Four chemicals commonly used in sunscreen activate a virus that can bleach the coral. "The researchers estimate that 4,000 to 6,000 metric tons of sunscreen wash off swimmers annually in oceans worldwide, and that up to 10 percent of coral reefs are threatened by sunscreen-induced bleaching."

Of course you yourself won't be bleached if you don't wear any sun protection; you'll be cooked red instead. So the sensible solution is eco-safe/marine friendly sunscreen like that produced by Caribbean Sol. (As in Caribbean Solutions.)

It feels the same on your skin and blocks out the rays with the same zinc oxide (not one of the four culprits in bleaching), but is biodegradable and won't harm the coral or the fish. In my tests it performed just as well as the standard kind. It comes in SPFs ranging from 4 to 25 and there's also a kid's sunscreen version.

If you can't find the Caribbean Sol version, check around for others, but be wary: it's easy for a sunscreen to say "oil-free" or "eco-friendly" and still be filled with the offending chemicals. There's no regulation on the terms. Some outdoor sports and gear stores sell another brand, Mexitan, that is one of the only ones approved for some of the "natural sunscreen only" places in the Yucatan.

The other solution is to wear a sunshirt of some kind instead--probably the best bet anyway if your back will be facing the sun for hours of snorkeling.

Carry-on Sunscreen for Your Beach Trip

The three-ounces and under rule for flying is an inconvenience if you are trying to travel with a carry-on bag. But you can get around it pretty easily with small containers, travel-sized toiletries, or innovative products like non-liquid travel sheets.

There's one item that is especially problematic though: sunscreen. Three ounces of conventional sunscreen isn't going to last you very long if you're vacationing in the tropics. You could wait and buy it there, but you'll pay twice as much.

So, when I was going to Roatan Island on Delta--which only flies there one day a week--I brought along this three-ounce spray sunscreen from CVS. I was skeptical about these spray sunscreens when they first came out, but if you really rub them in evenly, they seem to work just fine. The real benefit for travelers though is you can get a lot more use out of three ounces of spray than you get from that amount of regular sunscreen lotion.

This sunscreen comes in a strong aluminum canister and has an SPF of 30. (And it's actually more squat than the bottle pictured here.) In my tests in the blazing sun on a beach, it performed well and didn't feel as gunky as the usual stuff. I used it for five days and still had enough left that I brought it home. The three-ounce spray sunscreen from CVS retails for $5, but is often on sale for less.

Pen-sized Hand Sanitizer

I'm as game as the next guy for making fun of those travelers who load up on hand sanitizer for a trip, as if there are somehow 10 times more germs abroad than at home. (The germophobe gets a starring role in the new Nim's Island movie, with an ongoing Purell product placement via Jodie Foster.)

As a parent though, I know there are times when your kid is carrying a whole petri dish of stuff on his/her hands. But then it's time to eat the airplane or food stall snack, with no sink and soap in sight.

This cool little hand sanitizing spray device from CVS lets you kill all the germs without loading up your bag or worrying about the 3-ounce carry on rules. It's the size of a large ink pen and has all of 0.17 ounces (5ml) in it. The protective top even has a clip for hooking it to a pocket. Pull the top off and there's a little spray nozzle. No mess before or after.

This mini hand sanitizing spray fits into a purse or pocket easily so you can keep it handy in flight or while on the move. It retails for a mere $1.79 at their stores, so this is one gadget impulse buy that you won't regret later.

Sony PSP Slim for Travel Boredom

Back in December I received a loaner version of the new and improved Sony PSP 2000 to try out and evaluate for this travel gear blog. Now that I've spent about 30 hours of the last month playing with it, I think it's time I get around to actually writing a review. (And getting back to work.)

Overall, this is an impressive piece of technology. It falls short in a few areas (more on that later), but what it does well it does really well. If my travel hours in transit weren't spent catching up on writing and catching up on magazine reading, I could pack this and my music player and be a pretty happy traveler no matter how far I was going. For say, a 12-year-old kid you have to lug along on a plane trip, this Sony PSP would keep them from whining even once.

It does two things quite well: play games and play video. The catch is that both will cost you dearly: this device could accurately be called the Proprietary Sony Player because nothing you have bought or downloaded from somewhere else will work on it without a good bit of effort or expense. The device itself doesn't have its own storage, so everything resides on an ironically named "Universal Media Disc" (like a tiny CD-rom) or on their proprietary memory card called the Memory Stick. I won't go into the process of storing music or video on here, but be advised it's a pain and you'll need a lot of card storage capacity.

The wireless network features advertised should be ignored except for networked gaming with friends. Trying to browse a website or check e-mail is so annoying that you'll be tempted to throw the thing against a wall.

So let's look at its strengths. Video played on here from a UMD looks fantastic. As clear and vivid as a regular TV, with movies shown in widescreen format. Games on here are a true wonder. The graphics are as intense and detailed as many full console games, with great sound and responsive controls. Keep in mind that there are potentially 10 different buttons to use though, so younger children will probably be better off with the simpler Nintendo DS handheld. After trying out three games, I can say that some commands are far from intuitive, from the initial menu function to the games themselves. Expect a learning curve and some quality time with your manual.

There are other annoyances here and there, like no warning when your battery is about to fail in the middle of a game, and the fact that the optional AV cable kit allows you to watch video on TV, but not play games. Overall though, this PSP delivers as a console-level gaming device and video player packed into a tiny device fit for travel. It only weighs 6.2 ounces, yet it sports a 4.3-inch LCD screen with a 480 x 272-pixel resolution.

Would I take this along for my own kid when we go on vacation, if she were a bit older? Yes, but with clear ground rules about how long she can play with it each day and when. If a geezer like me can get addicted to playing Field Commander for days on end, you know kids with no job and family guilt to hold them back are going to be in trouble. There are bound to be arguments-a-plenty when it's time to put it down and go walk on the beach or have dinner together.

Consider what you get for the money, the device itself is a great value. You can buy the new Sony PSP 2000 straight up for about $170 to $180, or you can get something like the PSP Daxter Pack I received, with one game already included for $200. New games are $30 to $40 and movies are about the price of a regular DVD.

Search Sony PSP prices at Shopzilla

Plane Comfort Pac'nNap Flight Kit

We all know that flying in coach is far from comfortable these days. Flights are packed, but at the same time the budget ethos has spread to the likes of American and United. Your chances of getting a pillow and blanket, even for an international flight, are iffy. Then when you do get these items, how clean are they? Airlines usually give some vague dodgy answer when asked how often their blankets are laundered, but with cost cuts so rampant, you can bet it's not very often.

So if you plan to catch a nap on the plane, bring your own accessories. I tried out this Pac-n-Nap kit from Planecomfort and it offers a good way to get comfortable without carrying too much. It's about the length and width of a piece of copy paper, and about three fingers thick when repacked. Inside there's a 50" x 60" fleece blanket (five feet long!), inflatable pillow, fleece topped pillowcase, zippered storage pocket, and reusable totebag. You blow up the pillow, put it inside the pillowcase, and you're good to go. That pillowcase is actually the bag it comes in -- the inside of the bag is fleece -- which shows that the designers have done their best to keep the package compact. There's a handy outside pocket on the bag too, good for keeping your phone and boarding pass in, plus there's a detachable shoulder strap for carrying it.

Yesterday a magazine writer interviewed me about avoiding stress in the airport when flying and this item could definitely help in that department. If your flight gets delayed, which it probably will this winter if you're flying through a Northeast hub, you could whip out this Pac'nNap kit and be far more comfortable for those extra hours than the other passengers around you.

Plane Comfort's Pac'nNap is available at some luggage shops or direct from the company at PlaneComfort.net. Order from them before January 5 and there's no shipping charge. The regular black, red, or navy model is $30, a shocking pink one with zebra print or polka dot accents is $40. The latter includes a luggage finder strap to put around the handle of checked luggage.

2 Too Cool Map Products

Sure Google Earth and GPS devices have their place, but sometimes you want to be unplugged. There's a lot of value in a local map you can just pull out of your pocket or bag.

The traditional map makers aren't leaving innovation to the pixel programmers though. I just got samples of two cool new map products that I can't wait to use on a future trip.

fabMaps
The first is from good ole Rand McNally and is called the fabMap. Mine is especially fab because it's a map of South Beach, Miami--and because it's made of cloth! Yes, it's a regular looking, useful map, but printed in color on cloth that's stitched on the side. That mean you can stuff it in your pocket, smash it into your purse, or get it wet at the beach. You can clean your sunglasses with it too, so there's your ruse if you want to look at it without appearing to be a clueless tourist.

The map has everything you'd expect from Rand McNally: streets, points of interest, hotels, and a distance scale marker. On the back of this South Beach map is a detail of Lincoln Road Mall, one of Espanola Way, and a symbol key. Other fabMaps are currently available for 15 popular tourist spots in the US, with more on the way. Right now that includes places like the French Quarter of New Orleans, the Theater District of Manhattan, the Las Vegas Strip, and the Fisherman's Wharf area of San Francisco. At only $5.95, this would be a great stocking stuffer.

City Walks and Village Walks
Chronicle Books has put out a series of maps arranged as walking tour cards in a box. You pull out the card you want and go take a hike. Arranged as City Hikes and Village Hikes, the boxes are smaller than a mass paperback book and contain "50 adventures on foot."

I got my hands on two of them: City Walks with Kids - New York and Village Walks - Provence and the Cote d'Azur.

I worked in Manhattan for a few years, so I already knew most of the areas in the New York with kids one. I just wish I had been able to take this box with me when we took our daughter there last year. One side of each card has an illustrated map, the other side has a few paragraphs of text. The cards point out all the kid-focused things in an area (including playground stops) and restaurants with food the little ones will like. Some of the cards focus on a neighborhood walk and others focus on one attraction, such as the New York City Fire Museum.

If you're going to be somewhere more than a half hour, it's probably best to group two or three of these together to have enough to do outside of mealtimes. That's easy to do though: they are in order from the bottom tip of Manhattan up to the Bronx, with the last seven hitting Queens, Brooklyn, and Staten Island. All cards show how to get there by subway or bus and have stops marked on the map.

I haven't been to the the area covered by the French village walks set, but these cards are in a similar format, with a more traditional looking map on one side and text geared to patient adults on the other. There's a lot of dawdling built into the assumption on the itineraries though, so some look as if they would only take about 10 minutes to complete. It would pay to walk out the door with all three or four covering sightseeing walks in Nice or Avignon if it's not lunchtime or whatever they call happy hour in France. These cards would be a great companion in your pocket though as so many buildings or sights noted would be easily passed by on a normal stroll--unless you had your nose buried in a guidebook. Since these are lighter and easier to carry, they would allow you to walk with a lighter load.

The City Walks map cards sell for $14.95 and would be a thoughtful gift for a traveler or even a local resident of one of these regions. The City Walks with Kids series is also available for D.C., Paris, and San Francisco. The adult ones are also available for Los Angeles, Boston, Chicago, D.C., New York, Toronto, Barcelona, Tuscany, Amsterdam, Rome, Paris, and Ireland. For info on these and future versions, search the Chronicle Books site.

Altec Lansing Orbit 360 Travel MP3 Speaker

Most speaker systems that hook to your MP3 player are either too big to take with you in a suitcase or they're too cheap-sounding and flimsy to project outside a hotel bathroom. This Orbit 360 MP3 speaker from Altec Lansing thankfully occupies the middle ground. It's not without a few odd interaction annoyances, but overall it's a good choice for portable sound, on a budget, in a small package.

This is a single speaker, meaning you won't get the stereo effect, but the upside is that it is one good speaker instead of two halfway good ones. In my tests it easily filled a 15 by 15 foot room with sound--definitely good enough for your average hotel room or beach deck. The bass response was better than the usual tinny speakers in this price range, though naturally it performs better on music with lots of treble (like electronica, dance music, and salsa) than it does with thumping rap or heavy metal. There's definite distortion at high volume though. With my cheapo MP3 player I got to about 80 percent of max before it got distorted. On my iPod it started getting distorted at about 65 percent (due to the crappier iTunes compression probably). A portable CD player did best, at around 90 percent of potential volume, probably because the original sound source was better quality.

It uses three AAA batteries--not included--and so far I've run it about six hours on a set of rechargeables without it running down. Supposedly it will go up to 20 hours on a set of batteries if you're not cranking it.

The product designers did some things right but appear to have been smoking something when planning others. What they did right was make it so that the connecter cord winds into the speaker itself. They also included an adapter that makes it able to plug into pretty much any MP3 player and some mobile phones. This Orbit speaker may send your patience into orbit at first though: you actually have to use both hands and considerable force to get the battery cover off and back on. To turn the unit on, you don't just flip a switch. You actually have to put one hand on the bottom, one hand on the top, and crank it to one side. Then the reverse when you want to turn it off. Forget any ideas of quick mood enhancement by keeping this on the nightstand.

After you get used to the design quirks though, this is a solid but compact speaker that is worth the packing space. At a list price of $40 (and on sale for $30 at many online retailers), this is worth picking up for yourself or as a gift for a traveler.

It's a bag! It's a ball!

I love to feature things in the Practical Travel Gear blog that can perform double duty. This 24-7 Flip & Tumble Bag sounded like a perfect candidate and I'm happy to say that it delivers. It's a bag! Yes indeed. It's a ball! Works well for that too.

OK, you may be saying, "I don't really need a ball, I just need a bag." Well, as someone who just spent 20 minutes playing catch with my daughter with this thing, her laughing as it tumbled down the stairs, I say, "You never know." If you will ever have kids around to entertain, you're always prepared. In practical terms though, the fact that it rolls up into something slightly larger than a hacky sack means you won't have any trouble stuffing it into a purse, a messenger bag, a daypack, or a glove compartment. It'll even fit in the car cupholder (but don't forget and put your hot coffee on top of it).

How 'bout that bag? It holds up to 20 pounds and is the right size for a few quick items from the deli, wine shop, or grocery store. Carry this around all the time and you'll have a lot fewer plastic grocery bags to throw away. Naturally, it weighs next to nothing and it slings over your shoulder nicely.

You can be the first on your block to have one in your choice of four colors - they start shipping next week. You may seen these bag balls in retail stores later, but for now get it at the Flip and Tumble 24-7 site.

Epson PictureMate Portable Photo Printer

A funny thing happened when we all switched to digital cameras: we forgot to order prints. In the old days you just dropped off your rolls of film at the photo lab and then had a stack of shots to pass around, send to the relatives, and plop into a scrapbook. Now we have more photos, better photos, and a less bulky way to store them, but they're all just bits and bytes that seldom make it into our physical world. We either have to upload them to an online service or fiddle with special paper and settings on a good computer printer to get real photos we can hold in our hands.

Enter the Epson PictureMate Dash printer, which turns the printing chore into something convenient and dead simple. It cranks out amazingly good photos from a variety of media and is barely bigger than a lunchbox. You could easily take this along on a road trip and print out family reunion photos right there on the spot.

The set-up instructions were excellent with a "Start Here" flyer just giving me the basics, then a clear, well-written manual explaining how each function works once it's set up and ready. With the basic PM260 model I tested, you can print photos from a memory card, direct from your camera, from a computer, from a Bluetooth device, or from a USB drive. With the larger PM290 model, there's a CD drive for printing from a disc or saving to a disc.

The only bug I encountered was an inability to print proper photos from the imaging program already on my computer (Ifranview). I got extra white space down the side. I had to install Epson's software that came with the printer, then everything went swimmingly. The photos are crisp, clear, and exactly like what I was seeing on my screen. There's a basic built-in editor on the printer itself too, so in several cases I was able to crop or zoom before printing and improve the image before it printed. Photos took less than 40 seconds each to print and came out dry, ready to hold.

I would advise buying an extra pack of paper and ink when you order this though: the print pack that comes with the machine only allowed 23 prints in my test before running out. (The "low ink" warning started at 19 prints). That will cost you close to $40 for 150 prints. As with any of these photo printers, you're going to spend more per print than you would if you just ordered from Kodak Gallery or Shutterfly, but you get instant gratification and the ability to adjust on the fly. I printed out lots of family pics and vacation pics for the relatives and am in their good graces again. Now if I could just remember to back up my hard drive for the rest...

Overall, this is a convenient, well-designed printer that does one job exceptionally well: the printing of quality 4X6 photos. Epson's photo prints are reputed to last 96 years in a frame or 200 years in an album. It's got lots of cool features a techie would love, but it's easy enough for Grandma to figure out on her own. At a retail price of only $99, this item is highly recommended.

Get the Epson PictureMate Dash at Amazon

Visit the Epson PictureMate site


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