A week or so ago I spent a week in France and never turned on roaming data as I’m terrified of getting a large bill on my iPhone. I noticed how little I used the device and this got me thinking to how much we rely on mobile data access for our smartphones.
Just looking at my first two homepage 15 out of the 32 rely upon the internet to function. The others are mostly the built in functions (phone, messages, settings etc). So when I’m travelling in Europe my iPhone almost becomes a PDA.
I have more pan-European trips coming up and know my iPhone will fall towards the bottom of my bag! This makes me miss the USA where despite patchy coverage, at least you can drive more than few hours and still have data.
Why can’t the mobile operators treat the United States of Europe the same as they treat the United States of America?
Sid
Good point. I thought the European Parliament was trying to establish some kind of norms and force operators to lower their prices (and make them more reasonable) for European roaming charges (which are ridiculously high!) But that was months ago and I haven’t heard any more about it.
I have stopped going online with my phone as of late since Vodafone continues to screw up their bills, and each month we have to ring up and jump through hoops to rectify it. My phone has become a fusion of my traditional pda for functions such as calendar, tasks, ebook, music, carrying basic info in docs and spreadsheets etc. and the regular phone functions such as calling and texting. I have turned 3G off and my battery life can now easily get me through 3 days! But it does kind of defeat the purpose of having a smart phone in 2010.