Travel gear: making travel easier

Nitecore Tiny Monster Torch

It’s always useful to throw a torch in your luggage. Nitecore claim its Tiny Monster TM06 is the world’s tiniest, lightest 3800 lumens torch (or flashlight as they’d put it), courtesy of four Cree LEDs focused in a powerful reflector that can throw a 330 metre beam. They’re housed in a rugged aluminium body that’s rated IPX-8 waterproof. A pair of switches control the various setting such as low-power, strobe, SOS, and a there’s a power indicator. The blazing price may limit its broad appeal, but if you want the brightest, smallest, lightest ... £170 including lanyard, holster and spare seals (phew) from nitecore.co.uk

SanDisk iXpand

One downside of the always-available, high quality camera on our smartphones is that we race through memory that would have virtually constituted a company’s computer server not so long ago. iPhones in particular, with their lack of an SD slot for extra memory, can be frustrating, especially if you’re somewhere interesting and getting the error messages about storage. SanDisk has launched iXpand, a flash drive which connects via the Lightning port (5 series and up). You can store photos and video, and stream movies from it. There’s a different model, SanDisk’s Ultra Dual, for Android. 16GB version for about $60/€52, see shop.sandisk.com

Casio G-Shock GBA-400 Watch

Casio has other G-Shocks that can pair with your phone, showing call info and so on, but the new GBA-400 has the added feature of being able to act as a controller for your music too. Using Bluetooth 4 and its G’Mix app, you can EQ your tracks and crank the volume from your wrist. $200/€173 from shopcasio.com

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