Gadgetory

traveling is always hard but traveling with a kid or two can be especially difficult by now we all know that plugging kids into a tablet can buy you some time and some judgmental looks from strangers but that tablet's no good if out of power and short on content I'm Donna Bell here are some of my best tips for making the most out of a tablet while traveling with kids first buy your kids some headphones trust me you don't want to be listening to Thomas the train for hours at a time through iPad speakers and neither does anyone around you small kids will often find earbuds uncomfortable so pick up some affordable kid sized headphones for a grade school age kid a closed back pair of Panasonic are PHT x7s will keep sound from bleeding out and they're comfortable to wear for a long haul if two kids are listening to the same iPad a five dollar headphone splitter is pure gold if you're worried that your kid is listening at an unsafe volume use the iPads parental restrictions to lock the maximum volume to a level you're comfortable with also realize that the tablet is only good if the battery isn't dead so bring your charger bring an in car charger maybe even invest in a portable charging pack and understand how to conserve the power you have put the tablet in airplane mode keep the brightness down and know that games will typically drain battery power two or three times faster than listening to music or watching video so avoid games if you can especially graphically intense games like driving games or first-person shooters instead of games video is your best friend but forget about Netflix or any streaming video if you're on the move it's too unreliable and you're just asking for a meltdown when the video doesn't load instead download videos ahead of time it can get expensive but there are ways to save money for TV shows buying an entire season will save you a few bucks over buying shows individually even better look for the option to download an SD the standard def version can be substantially cheaper and it's nearly impossible to tell the difference on an iPad also keep in mind that some kids shows are short so a whole $15 season can often take less time than one five-dollar movie so to stretch your dollar look for deals on kids movies you can download multiple rentals in a the last up to 30 days on the iPad but once he started on watching one you have only 24 hours to finish it in addition to rentals it's worth paying full price for a few tried-and-true gems that can stand up to repeated viewings and finally download some of this content to your phone as well it never hurts to have a back-up plan so there you go that's my best advice for when you're trying to prepare your tablet for a long trip with a kid or two more tablet tips and tricks visit cnet-dot-com-slash-loaded