Traveling with your iPhone is no big deal. Traveling with just your iPhone, and expecting it to fill in for a laptop, that's something else. I've just returned from a two-week vacation trip with my wife to France, Switzerland and Italy, and thought I'd see just how far the iPhone would go. I outfitted it with apps for writing, blogging, sightseeing, booking hotels and airplane flights and brought along a Bluetooth keyboard to speed up typing. What worked? What didn't? Here's a rundown.
AT&T Phone and Data Roaming -- works.
iPhones work in Europe. Period. They just do. Of course, if you don't protect yourself from roaming charges, they will burn a big hole in your bank account too. I bought an international phone roaming package for $5 a month that knocked the $1.29/minute airtime charge down to $.99. My phone worked flawlessly everywhere I went. I also bought a data roaming package -- $50 for 50 megabytes, which turned out to be too small by half (more about that below). Fortunately, AT&T will let you upgrade the package on the fly, saving you big bucks over the pay-as-you-go rate of $5 a meg. AT&T gives you instructions on how to control and monitor your data usage, using the 'Usage' and 'Network' menus of your Settings app. Wi-fi, of course, replaces data roaming where you can get it ... free in the better hotels, available at various charges in airports and other expected spots. Data roaming worked flawlessly everywhere I went.
Skype: Works and saves you money
In two weeks, I used 43 minutes of AT&T airtime. I would have used more, much more, but I used Skype instead for several calls that ran upwards of a half hour each. Skype worked as well as it does at home, even with incoming calls and voicemail. I have a Skype phone number in addition to my regular Skype name. It's a US phone number and it costs $2.95 a month. As far as I can tell, all my calls between this number and other US phones were free of Skype charges, just like they are at home. Skype calls from my phone to Euro numbers were billed at the Skype rates ... typically a few pennies a minute. Great way to beat AT&T's airtime charges, right? Well, yes, but Skype burns data. I couldn't measure this, but my gut tells me that even with data roaming charges included, Skype was the way to go for long calls to the US...or anywhere else.
Who can resist the temptation to check in to the Bridge of Sighs or post a cool video or a picture of an Italian bidet and ask his FB friends what they think it is? I sure couldn't. The iPhone's Facebook made it all too easy to yield to temptation ... and burn through data roaming at an alarming rate. Next time, wi-fi only for Facebook! I promise!
iPhone Camera: There are better cameras, of course
We bought a new camera for this trip. My wife, the better photographer, used it most of the time and it took great photos ... much better than my iPhone 3GS. I'm sure it would have taken better videos too. But there's something about the ease and unobtrusiveness of the iPhone that allowed me to get some candid videos that wouldn't have happened any other way. Most of them uploaded either to this blog or directly to FaceBook (data burn!) with ease ... especially when we were on wi-fi.
Bluetooth keyboard: what a joy!
My Bluetooth keyboard (the light, low-profile aluminum Apple version) paired up with iPhone just fine, though not on the first go. And it was a kick to use it to type emails, blog posts and whatever .... I felt like I was getting away with something. And the keyboard takes up zero space in luggage. It's a great idea if you're going to use a phone (or an iPad, for that matter -- everyone on the road seems to be using one nowadays) as a laptop substitute.
iBooks app: Lifesaver
This was my first experience with an e-book app. I sampled four books for free, then bought complete versions of two crime novels to read. Bye-bye paperbacks ... at least as long as the batteries hold out.
BlogPress blogging app: perfect
Only two things kept me from using BlogPress day and night for insightful blog entries that included on-the-spot uploads of video and photos from my iPhone: the cost of data roaming (and/or wifi) and my own conscience (it's a vacation, stupid!) The program is almost flawless, and elegantly simple. It uploads your photos to its own server, your videos to YouTube, and it automatically puts out Facebook notices and Twitter tweets about your new blog entry. The only bug I found was the 'Location' feature ... I assume it pulls your current location and automatically enters it into the Location field of your blog entry. Never worked for me, and crashed the iPhone a few times. Just don't use it.
Kayak booking app -- too slow
Unless you're desperate to find something online and you have a lot of time, skip this one. So many of its listings have data that require you to leave the app and hit Safari to retrieve (data burn!). By the time you've gone through this awkward process to get info on three or four hotels, you've missed your train stop.
Map app -- it wasn't intended to help you find the Ponte Vecchio while running through the streets
You'd think this would be the perfect app to keep you from getting lost in a strange country, and it is. Or it would be, if it were an iPad, with lots of screen real estate. As it is, by they time you find the right pin on your map and scale it so that you can read the names of streets, your spouse, who has the paper map, has already checked in to the hotel. And since you're wandering the streets with this thing, you're on data roaming (burn!!), not wi-fi.
Dropbox: This is the future. Deal with it
I keep a spreadsheet with all my passwords on it. I thought I might need this while abroad, in case of emergency. So I uploaded it to DropBox from my Mac before the trip, and voila, accessed it when I needed to login to, uh, well, I think it might have been FaceBook. Never mind. The point is that this easy-to-use personal cloud server, or something like it, could mean that not too far in the future (like, maybe, next week) you would never need a laptop for the road again. You'd simply store all your files online and download them to your mobile phone or pad. Woohoo!
iPhone batteries: you can almost smell them dying.
Now that I'm back in the States, I keep looking at my iPhone's battery indicator, assuming that it's about ready to need a charge. That's a habit I picked up on the trip, where an overnight charge got me just about through the lunch hour. I think all this data roaming is energy-intensive. Or maybe it's just the air and the food. And my phone is a 3GS, not the new thrifty 4G.
Scrabble app: Works great, as far as I know
My wife and I get into Scrabble mode every once in a while. I bought this app just in case it happened on a train or plane, but no luck. We found other things to do. It does have a solitaire mode that I hope to get into one of these days.
Bottom line: Go for it!
iPhone from AT&T has covered the essentials: accessible (though not cheap) international rate plans; apps that keep you working on the phone and sync to your personal cloud, wi-fi and Bluetooth that connect you better to a changing world. The iPhone's tiny screen makes it an unlikely long term contender for laptop replacement; the Pad is the thing to watch.
