GeekDad Review: Active Era Premium Queen Size Air Bed With Built-In Pump

I spend much of my testing a wide range of high tech gear-and many of these products end up with a review published on GeekDad. Every now and then I also stumble across some considerably more basic products, but ones that I think readers might be interested in. Case in point, an air mattress from Active Era.

Few things are more boring than an air mattress, but they are also something that many people end up buying because they’re just so useful. They provide a near instant bed for overnight guests when you run out of spare rooms, they’re great for camping, and when not in use they roll up into a compact package you can stuff on a shelf.

They also tend to be pretty terrible. Between camping and kids’ sleepovers, we’ve gone through a half dozen of the things in the past decade. I’ve stuck to the big names you see in stores, but my experience has been inflation hassles (every use starting with “Where did I put the pump with all the nozzles?”), uncomfortable sleeping that’s also too close to the ground, and air leaks. After considerable research, I tossed out our latest “dead” air mattress, bit the bullet, and bought an Active Era air bed from Amazon.

It’s priced at $67.99, which is very reasonable, and it has a four-star rating out of 530 reviews (a good portion of which…