The Penn Stater Magazine

‘Roaming’ Around Europe, Electronically Speaking

July 22, 2010 at 1:28 pm Tina Hay 3 comments

Note: This post is full of talk about laptops, iPads, iPhones, and international roaming plans … if that doesn’t interest you and you want to skip this one, my feelings won’t be hurt!

The France/Bavaria/Oberammergau trip was the fourth Alumni Association trip in the past five years on which I’ve kept a blog, and each time the technology has advanced enough that it’s a little easier, logistically speaking, than the time before. I didn’t have to seek out Internet cafés, except in Oberammergau—most of the time I could blog on my laptop from the comfort of my hotel room. And even in Oberammergau I was able to use my laptop for blogging; I just had to pay €3 per hour, or about $3.90 U.S., to be able to access a wireless signal.

A few months before the trip, I acquired an iPad, and for a while I wondered if I could use that for blogging and leave my laptop at home. But the logistics of that were a little daunting: For one thing, there wouldn’t have been an easy way to get photos from the camera directly onto the iPad (Apple has since come out with a Camera Connection Kit, but it didn’t seem to be available when I was getting ready for the trip), and for another, there wouldn’t have been a way to edit the photos—crop, adjust exposure, remove dust spots, etc.—except via the Photoshop Mobile app, which I haven’t had much success with. So I lugged the laptop with me across the pond.

I put photos from our trip onto my iPad so the travelers could look at them on long bus or train rides.

I took the iPad with me, too, but mostly to entertain the Penn State passengers on long bus or train rides. I would copy my trip photos from the laptop onto the iPad, then lock the laptop in the hotel safe and bring the smaller, more portable iPad with me on the bus so the travelers could see pictures of where we’d been so far.

And, to complete the electronic trifecta, I also took my iPhone on the trip. I wonder if the day will come when I’ll be able to blog from that—it would be the ultimate in convenience, but I don’t think we’re anywhere near there yet. Mostly I used the iPhone to check the weather, look up information on the web for later blog posts (e.g., am I spelling “luftmalerei” correctly?), and occasionally to consult Google Maps to figure out how to get back to the bus when I had wandered off course in, say, Bamberg.

I had gone to the AT&T store shortly before the trip to add some international coverage on my iPhone, and the guy there was extremely helpful in showing me the various options for global phone, texting, and data plans. I ended up spending maybe 10 bucks on a texting plan and another $100 or so to buy 100 megabytes of international data coverage, which turned out to be plenty.

The trick was to keep an eye on the two numbers at the bottom and keep the combined total under 100 MB.

Most importantly, the AT&T guy showed me how to keep an eye on my data usage when I was over there. Basically, when you arrive in Europe, you go into the Settings app on your iPhone, choose General/Usage, and reset the Usage stats to zero. Then, every time you need to use the iPhone, you go to Settings/General/Network and turn Data Roaming on. Do what you need to do—check the weather, check Facebook, whatever—and then go back into Settings/General/Network and turn Data Roaming back off. I must have done this 100 times during the trip.

Meanwhile, you check the Usage stats every so often to see how many of your allotted megabytes you’ve used. Since I had bought 100 MB and I was over there for 12 days, I mentally rationed myself to 8 MB per day. I quickly discovered that checking the weather used a mere 0.2 MB, while uploading a photo to Facebook used more like 0.5 MB.

Anytime you can turn the wi-fi function of the iPhone on and connect wirelessly, it doesn’t count against your allotted megabytes; the 100-mb thing refers only to 3G connections. So I’d try to delay checking my e-mail or sending e-mails from my iPhone until I was in a wi-fi zone—which, by the way, the French pronounce “wee-fee,” as in, “Sorry, we have no wee-fee at this restaurant.”

By the time the trip was over I had used about 67 MB (see photo above)—well under the 100 MB limit I had purchased.

AT&T has a helpful page for iPhone users who want to avoid costly roaming charges while they’re outside of the U.S. And this information from Rick Steves is also useful in terms of various options for getting on the Internet while traveling.

Tina Hay, editor

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Entry filed under: Alumni Association. Tags: AT&T, blogging, blogging overseas, Camera Connection Kit, international data plan, iPad, iPhone, using iPhone internationally.