by Joey Lombardi posted in Products & Prizes

Last month, my family and I spent a week in the Acadia area of Maine.
It is a beautiful place to visit, but it comes at a cost: about 11 hours in the car (from New Jersey). The idea of spending almost a dozen hours in a car with a 4-year-old and his two older cousins might give some parents nightmares, but honestly they were pretty good -- for one major reason.
If you have been reading my posts here at BabyCenter, you know I like my gadgets. While I think the boys were good on their own, I brought a device that definitely kept them happy.
I knew that cell phone reception was going to be problematic once we got to Maine, so I started to think of ways to have some content to watch at the cottage and in the car ride. I discovered a SanDisk USB drive with built in wifi.
You can load all your music, movies, and photos to the thumb drive and then access the files while on the go without having to use the phone's data plan (which wasn't an option even if I wanted it to be).
This is one of those situation where I wasn't sure how well this thing was going to work and it totally exceeded my expectations. I popped it into a portable battery and it ran the entire ride home. It was in use the whole week around the clock.
You can pick up a 64GB version for $35 at Amazon. Speaking of Amazon, we gave our son one of their cheap $50 tablets. For $50 bucks or less (it was $33 on prime day), the tablet is much better than it should be. ...