14 Cool Tech Products That Solve Everyday Problems

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Once upon a time, the Walkman and then the flip phone were on the cutting edge of consumer gadgets for anyone who had their finger on the technological pulse. But after their day in the sun, the favored gadgets of yesteryear have to step aside to make room for younger tech. Fortunately, the wheels of technology roll ever onward and new gadgets are hitting store shelves and online retailers all the time. Some new gadgets are purely for entertainment purposes (in fact, those are some of our favorites) while others have more practical applications.

If there's a minor annoyance in your everyday life that needs to be solved, there's a good chance someone has created a gadget for just that purpose. If you want to carry all of your groceries from the car in a single trip, there's a gadget for that. If you want to keep an eye on your pets while you're not at home, there's a gadget for that. And if you want to water the yard without lifting a finger, there's a gadget for that, too. They say that necessity is the mother of invention, so it should be no surprise that many of the latest cool tech products are designed to solve common everyday problems. These are some of our favorites.

Usually, it's way easier to drive during the day than it is at night, thanks to all that wonderful sunlight. But twice a day, once in the morning and once in the evening, the sun reaches an angle that shines directly into your eyes. Glare can make driving not only more difficult, but also more dangerous.

Your car's built-in sun visor goes some of the way toward solving this problem by giving you an adjustable rectangle you can position between you and the sun. The only downside is that when your visor is blocking the sun, it might also be blocking the road. And if you're shorter than average, the visor might not do you any good at all. By contrast, a polarized sun visor like the one from Veharvim is transparent, blocking out some of the glare from sunlight while allowing you to see the rest of the environment.

This polarized sun visor connects to your existing opaque car visor with a couple of straps. When in use, it hangs below your existing visor to minimize glare and improve visibility. When not in use, it can be tucked away with your conventional opaque visor.

Anyone who has ever gone grocery shopping has probably experienced the tragedy of buying fruits and veggies only for them to go bad before you get a chance to eat them. Bluapple aims to solve that problem by absorbing a chemical compound which contributes to produce spoilage.

Ethylene gas is a natural compound released by plants as they ripen. Some fruits and veggies release more ethylene than others, and some are more sensitive to ethylene than others. One thing is for sure, keeping a bunch of produce all together in a closed container (like your refrigerator's crisper drawer) exposes your produce to higher levels of ethylene, leading them to spoil even faster.

Bluapple, a plastic blue apple containing the absorbing compound, goes in your crisper with your produce to suck up ethylene, extend the life of your produce, and reduce food waste. It's worth noting that Bluapple gets mixed reviews, so your mileage may vary.

These days, it's practically impossible to move through the world without a mobile phone. In most cases, they do so much more than make phone calls and send messages. We use them for entertainment, to get directions, to pay for things, and a whole lot more. It seems like every day some other element of our lives gets subsumed by our tiny pocket computers.

Despite improvements in battery technology, all that extra use takes its toll on your phone battery. It's not uncommon for a phone to run out of juice, even if it had a full charge when you left home. A battery phone case extends its battery life by letting the device wear a spare battery like a backpack.

You can find cases with differently sized batteries and for a wide selection of phones. Some battery phone cases, like Zueus' iPhone 17 Pro models, are even capable of wireless charging, and can be charged at the same time as your phone when placed on a wireless charger.

Some day in the far future, it might become impossible to misplace anything. Slowly but surely, we're making all of our favorite things trackable. Many modern vehicles come with built-in tracking equipment to help locate it in the event it is lost or stolen. If you misplace your smartphone, there's a good chance you can use a tracking function you previously set up to figure out where it is. DeWalt has its Tool Connect functionality which lets you keep an eye on your favorite power tools. And for everything else, there are handheld tracking tags.

Losing your keys, wallet, or other crucial "dumb" items can put a serious damper on your day. Unlike cell phones and other high-tech gadgets, there's no way to track their locations when they go missing. That is, unless you connect a tracking tag. Devices like Tile and Apple's AirTags use Bluetooth technology and other devices close by to determine and communicate their location. With a little preparation, you can avoid canceling all your credit cards and getting a new ID.

More and more, headphones and speakers are ditching wires in favor of Bluetooth connectivity. That's fine if you're using modern devices with Bluetooth capability. But if you're playing with your favorite vintage gadgets, or you encounter some aging tech out in the wild, you might run into some trouble.

If, for instance, you find yourself on an airplane that's showing a movie with only your wireless headphones, you have a few choices. You can hope the airline hands out cheap wired headphones, you can call a flight attendant and pay for headphones, or you can sit and watch everyone else enjoy movies and TV at 30,000 feet. Unless you have a Bluetooth transmitter.

A Bluetooth transmitter (like the Twelve South AirFly SE) plugs into almost any device's headphone jack and transforms its audio signal into a Bluetooth signal. It gives you more than 20 hours of audio on a charge, it recharges with an ordinary USB-C cable, and you can even keep using it while it charges. With a pocket-sized transmitter you can make almost any audio gadget into a Bluetooth capable gadget.

We haven't quite cracked the instant universal translators of "Star Trek" and other science fiction properties, but we're making progress.

The Scanmarker Pro is a pen-shaped device which scans text and transforms it into speech. Hold it like a highlighter, tracing the device across lines of text, and listen to those lines in audio format and in real time. It's useful for anyone who is just learning to read or who has difficulty reading, but it does so much more than transform text into speech.

The Scanmarker also translates text from one language to another. It has offline functionality for English, Spanish, French, German, and Italian and when you're online, you can translate text from more than 100 languages. It also has voice recognition so you can use the pen for real-time translation of spoken conversations. You could read books in whatever language they are printed, decipher text when traveling abroad, and speak to your neighbors no matter their primary language.

Technology manufacturers have changed the format for charging ports and peripheral ports several times in recent years. For a while, the charging landscape was like the Wild West, with every new device seemingly coming with its unique charging or power cable. It's one of the reasons so many of us have a bag, box, or drawer filled with old plugs and charging cables we can't seem to let go of.

Mini USB, Micro USB, and Lightning cables were all the standard for a while, and now they're fading into the rearview mirror, just a memory in the ever-growing halls of antiquated technology. Fortunately, there's been some movement toward standardizing the cable landscape, and most devices released in the last few years use a USB-A or USB-C connection.

Charging cable overload is less of a problem than it used to be, but until we land on a truly universal power cable format, we're going to have to deal with having multiple chargers. In the meantime, a tiny USB adapter can convert USB-C ports to USB-A and vice versa. Syntech makes a version that's very popular on Amazon.

An Apple Watch can simplify your life by putting your notifications right on your wrist. It can be used to pay for things, listen to music or podcasts, get directions, and more. But that's only if it keeps its charge throughout the day. Your Apple Watch is pretty small and its battery is even smaller. Even with advancements in battery technology, it just can't hold very much juice. It's not uncommon for the battery to run out, especially if you're using it overnight to track your sleep.

The Apple Watch doesn't have a charging port and only charges wirelessly using a specially-shaped magnetic charging cradle. These tiny Apple Watch-shaped powerbanks by Temdan attach to your keychain, bag, or belt loop and magnetically attach to your Apple Watch to recharge it on the go. There's enough charge to refill your watch battery at least once. Just make sure to choose a portable battery that's compatible with your model of Apple Watch.

Even though the world is becoming increasingly digital, most of us still use a pen on a pretty regular basis. If you're going to carry a pen, it might as well be a cool one. This handheld writing utensil is already one of the most important technological innovations in the history of our species, but a particular version attempts to improve upon it.

The Kezkals Multi-Tool Pen Set has a stylus, a bottle opener which doubles as a phone holder, two-in-one Phillips and flat head screwdriver, LED flashlight, bubble level, ruler, and, of course, a pen.

The folks who made this pen clearly looked at the everyday pen and imagined that it could be more. Is this pen a little more than it should be? Perhaps. No one really use those bubble styluses anyway, but it is undoubtedly cool and is sure to come in handy more often than your average writing utensil. Just don't let anybody borrow it. This isn't a pen you want walking away.

If you spend any time outside during the winter, you're probably familiar with disposable hand warmers. They've been around for decades, and they're useful when used in combination with gloves or mittens to help keep you warm and comfortable.

There are a couple different kinds of commonly found hand warmers. Some contain water, salt, activated charcoal, vermiculite, and iron powder in a bag. The bag has tiny holes that let oxygen in, triggering the rapid oxidation of iron. It essentially rusts really fast, and the transformation generates heat which keeps your fingers from freezing. Another type of hand warmer uses the sudden movement of a metal disk to trigger crystallization inside the pouch, releasing heat as a byproduct. They usually last several hours before cooling off and being discarded.

Alternatively, you can get rechargeable magnetic hand warmers. Instead of a chemical reaction, electric hand warmers generate heat through electrical resistance. They are rechargeable, reusable, and last for hours. You can even set different temperatures based on your preferences.

Even though remote work is becoming more common, many of us still leave home every day and pack a lunch to eat later on. The workday lunch break can be both the best part of the day and a logistical nightmare. Unless you're eating sandwiches every day, you're going to have to use the shared workplace microwave, which always smells like burnt popcorn with has an interior that looks like a Jackson Pollock painting.

Instead of doing that, you could heat your lunch in Crock-Pot's Electric Lunch Box. It has a 20 ounce capacity, which is just about the right size for a midday meal break. If you've ever been tempted to sneak a few bites of food straight out of the pot, this is your chance to get away with it guilt free. Using the Crock-Pot does take a little bit of preparation and consistent access to an electrical outlet. And unlike a microwave, a Crock-Pot can't heat up your food in a couple of minutes. It needs more time.

If your work situation allows it, a tiny Crock-Pot can be a delicious alternative to the microwave queue. It also has a removable inner container that is dishwasher safe, making cleanup easy.

Let us paint a picture. You get to work and make a cup of coffee to help push you through the morning. Maybe you take a few sips, then you get pulled away to solve some problem or get lost in the monotony of spreadsheets, and by the time you go for another sip your coffee has gone cold.

Cups of coffee have a way of being neglected. Sure, you could walk to the break room and reheat your cup, but it's never quite the same. The Ember Temperature Control Smart Mug offers an alternative solution by integrating a heating system into the cup to keep your coffee or tea nice and warm.

The cup's rechargeable battery can keep your drink warm for an extra 80 minutes before needing to be charged. Or you can use the charging coaster to keep your coffee warm all day long. No matter how often you get distracted or for how long, hot coffee will be waiting for you whenever you're ready for the next sip.

Smart home tech is practically passé these days, as more and more of us replace our thermostats with smart thermostats, our doorbells with smart doorbells, and so on. Still, if you want to dip your toe into the smart home landscape, smart plugs are a popular and useful entry point. You slot them between your existing outlet and your chosen device to make it controllable with your smartphone or smart home hub.

Setting up an Amazon Smart Plug is simple. You plug it in, download and open the Alexa app, and activate your plug. It can work with basically any household appliance or device that has a physical power switch or turns on automatically when plugged in. Connect it to a lamp or to your holiday decorations so you can turn them on and off more easily, or to a compatible coffee pot to start the morning brew from bed. You get the idea. There's no end to how you can use a smart plug.

It used to be that most of our shopping happened in real life, at brick and mortar stores. Package deliveries were a relatively rare and exciting thing. Nowadays, much of our shopping has moved online, with deliveries becoming more and more common.

With so many deliveries happening all the time and often when we're not at home, we run the risk of having our purchases stolen or damaged before we get home to retrieve them. The BenchSentry Connect is a package delivery box that keeps your packages safe from theft, weather damage, and other threats.

BenchSentry uses a numerical keypad to unlock the door, and you can give the code to delivery drivers in the delivery instructions. It can also be used for food deliveries and anything else you might need to stash temporarily. You can even bolt the box to the ground so it can't be carried away, and get alerts letting you know when a package gets delivered with an associated app.