Travel Gear: Wireless sounds from Philips, Nixon’s surfing smartwatch and the hairclip multitool.

Philips SoundShooter Wireless Speaker Looking not unlike some sort of sonic grenade, SoundShooter from Philips is a portable speaker to toss into your bag for a weekend away. The "pin" is actually a carabineer to clip it up. Delivering a pretty decent 2W of sound streamed wirelessly over Bluetooth, it's got a built-in rechargeable battery to keep the tunes coming. Philips claim eight hours of play time from a full charge and the auxiliary-in cable also doubles as the power lead so one less thing to get tangled. There's an integrated mic for hands-free phone calls which lets you pause the party. €57 from pixmania.ie

Nixon Ultratide Watch It's the world's smartest surf watch, according to its makers, and Ultratide certainly shows plenty of spec. This latest from Nixon adds plenty to its surf-focussed watch roster, the Supertide and Lodown. The key upgrade is an alliance with Surfline, tapping into its worldwide surfing conditions database. Like many of the new generation of smart watches, this uses your phone to do the heavy data-lifting, with links to your wrist to display it. For the Ultratide this mean tides, times, heights, swell direction, and more for over 2,700 surfing hot spots globally. $300 from nixon.com

Clippa Mini Tools Hairclip Though I’m obviously a fan of the multi-tool, I do understand that not everyone wants to throw a chunky

Leatherman

or

Swiss Army

into their, well, handbags. So here’s a more discreet travel gadget for the clip-wearing community. With a couple of screwdriver heads, a little wrench, a serrated cutting edge and the tiniest of rulers, the Clippa’s as efficient a mini-tool set as you’ll find. There’s even a supermarket trolley token if you’re inadvertently coin-challenged on a grocery adventure. $10 from

[ animicausa.com ]

@tomtomkelly