Best travel gadgets 2019: Here’s the essential holiday tech you shouldn’t leave home without

Nintendo Switch

£279, nintendo.co.uk
More essential for surviving a long-haul flight than an oxygen mask and a couple of the engines, the Switch is the ideal way to while away a couple of hours in the sky. Nintendo’s hit console has become its most beloved since the Wii, and its growing library of games includes instant classics like The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild and Super Mario Odyssey. The controllers detach and become two tinier controllers, enabling multiplayer gaming with the person in the seat next to you.

Sennheiser PXC 550

£299, sennheiser.com
The Sennheiser PXC 550 wireless headphones are geared towards the savvy business traveller, with cutting edge noise-cancellation designed to convert the thunderous roar of an Airbus A380’s jet engines to something more like the calming burble of a contented lamb. The earcup functions as a touchpad for controlling volume and music, while double-tapping allows you to focus your hearing on nearby voices – like a mediocre superhero – in case a kind flight attendant comes along to offer you your third gin and tonic.

Fitbit Charge 3

£129, fitbit.com/uk
For most, an essential component of being on holiday is keeping your heart rate at the bare minimum required to filter mimosas through your liver, but for those who like to keep active while travelling, there’s the Fitbit Charge 3. Alongside heart rate tracking and step counting, it now has GPS, enabling some nifty Strava compatibility.

Kindle Oasis

£229, amazon.co.uk
While the mid-range Kindle Paperwhite now also boasts waterproofing, the high-end Kindle Oasis was the first of the range to introduce the feature, allowing bookworms to go fully aquatic whether accidentally or on purpose. The Kindle Oasis is to e-readers what Eames was to nice chairs, it is a modernist expression of booklessness, precision-engineered and weighted to fit snugly in the hand, it is a rejection of the offerings of the tree in favour of the machined glory of mankind’s dominion over material science.

DJI Mavic Pro Platinum

£999, dji.com
Drones may be public enemy number one right now, but as long as you as wait until you’re well clear of any airports before you start buzzing around and doing loop-de-loops through the clouds, they’re a fun and professional tool for capturing dramatic landscape photographs and mountaintop selfie videos. DJI is droning’s gold standard, and its Mavic Pro Platinum drone is a cutting edge prosumer model with a gyro-stabilised 4K camera and enough brainpower to know how to return safely to your feet should it get lost or run out of battery power.

Tile Pro

£30, thetileapp.com
Smaller than a cream cracker, but larger than a postage stamp, this After Eight sized device clips to your most eminently loseable items – keys, bags, wallets – to ensure you always know where they are. It connects to your phone over Bluetooth, allowing you make the Tile ring if you’re within its vicinity, or showing the Tile’s last known location if it gets left behind. It’s even compatible with Google Home and Alexa, so you can ask your house where your keys are and they’ll begin chiming.

Beoplay A1

£229, bang-olufsen.com
Whether you’re camping in the Andes or just camping on your mate Andy’s balcony while you piece your life back together, a decent wireless speaker is a must to keep spirits up. The Beoplay A1 is a puck-shaped bluetooth boombox that makes sounds beyond its diminutive profile, and runs for a full 24 hours on a 2.5 hour charge. It fits in the palm and can be used to make phone calls too, so you can be bothered about accidents that weren’t your fault even while hiking in the wilderness.

Leica D-LUX 7

£995, leicastore-uk.co.uk
The latest version of Leica’s class-leading compact introduces a slew of new features designed to make capturing and sharing your travel highlights even more straightforward. It’s got a new four-thirds sensor behind that classic DC Vario-Summilux lens, which inches this camera out of the realms of a compact and into SLR-quality shooting. Bluetooth connectivity pings shots straight to your phone too, so you can get your holiday pics right up on Instagram without delay.