8 Mini Gadgets For Traveling Without Wi-Fi

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With every coffee shop offering free wWi, Starlink satellite internet, and huge areas of 4G and 5G coverage, you'd think that having no Wi-Fi while traveling would be rare. The truth is that the world is a wide and wonderful place. The further you go from urbanized areas, the fewer and far-between your chances to hop online can become. In a world where everything seems to rely on the internet, that can be a stress-inducing thought!

The good news is that not every gadget absolutely needs to be online to work, and sometimes you can conjure some connectivity for yourself by just using the right piece of gear. This way you can keep yourself occupied when there's no internet, or ensure you have access to the data you need no matter where you are. The important thing is to prepare for this before you leave. Once you're in that dead zone, it's already too late.

We've carefully selected a range of small, highly-portable gadgets that help make your travels easier and more tolerable whether you have Wi-Fi or not. So get ready to stuff your bags with the perfect travel companions, and brave the world outside your house and away from your Wi-Fi router.

If there's no Wi-Fi where you're going, then why not just bring your own? You shouldn't go on vacation without a travel router and when it comes to top choices for the one to pack, the ASUS RT-AX57 Go is a hard one to beat. This is a very modern Wi-Fi 6 travel router that offers 3Gbps of total wireless bandwidth.

Looking through the feature list, there is very little separating this from the Wi-Fi 6 home routers from ASUS. It can connect to your ASUS home mesh technology, so you can use it as a Wi-Fi mesh unit while at home. It also was WISP (Wireless Internet Service Provider) technology, which lets the router use another Wi-Fi point (like a hotel hotspot) as an internet source, and then shares it with all of your devices. This has safety benefits, where the travel router protects your devices from unscrupulous individuals on open public networks.

You can also connect an Ethernet cable to the WAN port, like you would a home router, but most useful perhaps is the USB port, which allows your to access smartphone USB tethering. As long as you have data on your phone (and your plan allows tethering) you can easily share Wi-Fi with all your other gadgets. You don't need internet access, as professional reviewers point out, you can still network your gadgets together to share files just like a home LAN. Oh, and it's powered by USB-C, which is super-convenient.

Everyone loves streaming these days, but if you're going on a long trip, especially if it's to another country, then you may not have access to the media you love. The answer is an external storage device like this Kingston XS1000 2TB portable SSD. You might immediately wonder why you shouldn't opt for a regular external hard drive, which is much cheaper on a per-gigabyte basis. It's a valid choice, but the simple fact is that SSDs are physically much more robust, and the chances are much greater that an HDD will be manhandled to the point where you could lose your data.

Besides this, SSDs are just so much faster. The XS1000 can reach up to 1050MB/s if you connect it to a fast-enough USB port, which means you can move data to and from it rapidly, and even run software off the drive directly with no issue. These days, most smartphones with USB ports can use SSDs as easily as a computer, so even if you don't travel with a laptop, there's a good reason to have one.

The router we just looked at happens to be a device you can plug an external drive into, which means you can even set up your own little NAS wherever you are if you combine an SSD like this with a travel router. Professional reviewers love how compact and powerful the XS1000 is, and it's even reasonably priced, all things considered.

We loved the Fujifilm Instax Mini 13, an entry-level instant camera that's perfect for creating nostalgic memories on a trip or at an event. However, not everyone loves the image quality from these retro cameras, and for them the Fujifilm Instax Mini Link 3 may be a better choice. This is basically an instant camera without the camera bit. It's a portable, battery-powered photo printer that works with a companion app on your phone. Snap your photo, edit it, and then send it to the printer wirelessly.

It will take about 60 seconds to print, and you'll have a 62mm x 46mm photo made with Instax mini film. Of course, like all "instant" cameras, the film does take a little longer to develop. You're looking at around 90 seconds for the final image to stabilize. So why is this great for traveling without Wi-Fi? Because you can share photos with the people you meet even if there's no internet, and even if they don't have a phone you can beam your digital snaps to.

According to expert reviews, the prints are vibrant and detailed, especially compared to dye-based competitors. However, that high-quality Instax film comes at a higher price, so you might want to be circumspect about the right moment to press the print button. At least this gets around the problem of instant cameras where you often don't even know if you framed the photo correctly. Here, you can take your time to edit your picture to perfection before committing.

One of the places you rarely have Wi-Fi is during a flight. Which means that, unless you've downloaded a few shows to your phone or tablet, you're going to be making use of the in-flight entertainment system. Except, as you now realize, you need a wired headphone set to hear the audio!

That's the problem solved by the Twelve South AirFly Pro 2. The original AirFly Pro was a headphone accessory we never traveled without, and this latest model, which arrived in 2025, improves on it in every way. It's a compact little device that turns any 3.5mm headphone jack into a Bluetooth transmitter. So all you have to do is plug in the dongle where your headphones would usually go, and connect up to two two headphones at the same time. Of course, you can use this with any headphone jack, not just the one on the back of an airplane seat. For example, if you want to use Bluetooth with your hotel TV, you can do it with ease.

The AirFly Pro 2 gets high marks from hands-on testers, who like the small size and excellent Bluetooth 5.3 performance. Depending on which headphones you're using, you might notice some small lip sync issues, which isn't too uncommon with Bluetooth audio, but it's hardly a deal-breaker. Whether you're flying or not, it's a travel gadget you'll eventually wish you had.

Most people have moved on to streaming services and have left their Discmans and MP3 players far behind. You do have the option of simply downloading music to your phone for offline listening. However, those downloads don't remain valid forever, and even if you have an expensive flagship phone, it's never going to be the last word in audio fidelity.

Which is why the lavish HiBy R4 MP3 & MP4 Player deserves a spot in the bag of any traveling audiophile. You see, this is actually, sort-of, an Android 12 phone. It's just been built for a very small set of functions. You can actually use Spotify, Tidal, and a few other streaming music apps with it. Likewise, you can play MP4 videos on its HD LCD. But the R4 has purpose-built high-fidelity audio hardware, both a 3.5mm and 4.4mm balanced output, and support for all the top-quality Bluetooth codecs. Best of all, the storage is expandable, which is not something you can say for most Android or any Apple phones today.

Professional reviewers say the R4 is built well and has great audio features, such as a system-wide EQ. The amplification is excellent which means you can use decent wired headphones with it, but very sensitive in-ear monitors can exhibit noise. If the HiBy is too rich for your blood, there are several excellent choices in our selection of the best modern MP3 players you can choose from instead.

Is the Nintendo Switch still worth buying? That's a fair question, and one we can answer with a confident "yes."  The Switch Lite is a smaller version of the original Nintendo Switch that lacks the ability to switch. In other words, there's no way to dock it to an TV and use it on an external display. This does mean some games that only really work in docked mode aren't going to be compatible with it, but with the exception of that small handful of titles, Switch games works on the Switch Lite.

When it first came out, reviewers praised the little console for bringing back pocketable handheld gaming. It's still a fantastic console, but the truth is that the Switch Lite is even better now, thanks to the advent of Virtual Game Cards. Before, if you owned more than one Switch, you had to designate one as your primary and only this one could work offline. A problem when the Switch Lite is the console you want to use while traveling. Now you only have to be online to move games to or from a Switch. After that it will work offline indefinitely.

Of course the Switch Lite works with physical games too, and the Nintendo Switch has one of the best game catalogs ever, with a great mix of first- and third-party games, Snap one up while you still can, it will serve you for years.

Maybe carrying around a dedicated gaming handheld doesn't appeal to you, and who could blame you? Modern smartphones are gaming powerhouses. Especially the latest flagship models, but you can enjoy console-grade gaming on even mid-range handsets these days. It's just that unless a games was carefully designed for it, touch controls aren't great. 

Luckily you can use almost any controller with a phone you want, but few are as compact and well-integrated as the Backbone One. While it's designed for iPhone, the USB-C version of this controller works with most Android phones, as per the company's official description. Reviewers were really impressed with this 2024 update to the classic controller that showed how well a gamepad could be combined with a phone when it first released. The new Backbone One has better ergonomics, partly thanks to magnetic adapters to fine-tune how they fit in your hands.

There are other options for both iPhone and Android, with a similar grip style from companies like Game Vice and GameSir, but the Backbone One is more compact than the other options that make it better for travel. Using this controller, you can play any offline games on your phone when you have no internet connection, and of course that's not just limited to Android native games. Emulation on Android has reached dizzying heights, and so if you want to play backups of your classic console games, or even games from Steam using an app like Game Hub or Winlator.

The Amazon Kindle Paperwhite probably needs no introduction. This new model has a snappier processor and improved 7" display, promising weeks of battery life and comes at a pretty reasonable $200 price point. That is, if you're willing to have ads on the lock screen. If you want an ad-free Kindle, you'll have to pay $20 more, which we think is certainly worth it. You can also opt to have three months of free Kindle Unlimited, but to activate this you must have a payment method on file and it will auto renew when the trial runs out.

Assuming you can navigate this small gauntlet, A Kindle Paperwhite is the perfect companion on a trip where there will be no Wi-Fi, and especially where there will not be frequent access to power. You can chill out on a desert island beach for weeks catching up on your reading. Take a decent power bank along, and you might not need to return to civilization for years.

There are many other eReader options out there of course, some of which are cheaper. However, the Kindle Paperwhite is especially compact, which we think is important in this company and of course you must have an Amazon Kindle to access Amazon's book service. If you're not fussed about that, there are other brands of e-readers that Amazon users swear by. For our money, however, the Paperwhite is still the model to go for.

Any trip can be stressful, and having the added anxiety of being disconnected from the net doesn't help. We chose a group of gadgets that can make those times fly past, but that doesn't mean just any old electronics doodad makes the cut.

To be on this shortlist of disconnection-friendly technology, we expect a customer rating of at least four stars or its equivalent on average. At the same time, any product on this list needs at least one in-depth review from a trusted, authoritative source which scores it at least that high.

As for the products themselves, they need to provide a useful feature that stays available without Wi-Fi or address the lack of Wi-Fi directly. The devices didn't need to be offline only, of course. They can provide additional features when connected to the internet. Apart from these basic requirements, naturally, everything on this list has to do a job that you'd actually need when away from home, whether it's just a quick trip to the beach, or a flight to the other side of the globe.