How to prepare for a trip abroad. 7 technology tips

For any long jour­ney you need to pre­pare well. Espe­cial­ly when it comes to going abroad. Com­mon­places like “don’t for­get your charg­er” are too obvi­ous, so we won’t talk about them. Here are some non-obvi­ous tech­no­log­i­cal tips from peo­ple who have trav­el expe­ri­ence abroad.

Check com­mu­ni­ca­tion stan­dards

When you have access to Wi-Fi, you can feel quite com­fort­able. You have access to instant mes­sen­gers, e‑mail appli­ca­tion updates — in gen­er­al, every­thing that you are used to at home. But out­side the air­port or hotel, things get a lit­tle more com­pli­cat­ed. You will have to rely on local mobile net­works to com­mu­ni­cate, so make sure your smart­phone will work in a par­tic­u­lar coun­try.

For exam­ple, did you know that the CDMA com­mu­ni­ca­tion stan­dard, which is avail­able in Ukraine, is not very com­mon all over the world. In addi­tion to our coun­try, there are cel­lu­lar CDMA oper­a­tors in the USA and Chi­na. But almost all of Europe prefers the good old GSM. There­fore, it is not worth going abroad with a cell phone.

Pre­pare an over­seas SIM card in advance

One piece of advice one often hears from trav­el­ers is that the first thing a user in a new coun­try should do is buy a local oper­a­tor’s SIM card. Good advice, but not always applic­a­ble. On a busi­ness trip or busi­ness trip, you may need a mobile con­nec­tion imme­di­ate­ly after leav­ing the air­port.

If you are high­ly depen­dent on com­mu­ni­ca­tion, get an inter­na­tion­al SIM card in advance. There are enough oper­a­tors sell­ing cards of inter­na­tion­al stan­dard on the mar­ket. Such SIM-cards work with­out roam­ing in hun­dreds of coun­tries and do not notice bor­ders. Such a con­nec­tion costs a lit­tle more than usu­al, but it’s worth it.

The only neg­a­tive is that your num­ber will always be list­ed as for­eign. For exam­ple, the Cana­di­an oper­a­tor KnowRoam­ing sells inter­na­tion­al SIM cards with Amer­i­can num­bers start­ing with “+1”. And Eston­ian Trav­el­Sim offers Eston­ian num­bers start­ing with “+372”.

Turn off two-fac­tor authen­ti­ca­tion

A very impor­tant point that almost no one thinks about. Before trav­el­ing abroad, dis­able two-fac­tor authen­ti­ca­tion on the ser­vices that you plan to use. Regard­less of whether you buy an inter­na­tion­al SIM card or get a new num­ber upon arrival in the coun­try, your native mobile num­ber will be tem­porar­i­ly unavail­able. But it is to him that most of the Inter­net ser­vices are tied. If you for­get your pass­word abroad and try to change it, active two-fac­tor authen­ti­ca­tion will give you a lot of trou­ble.

Use mes­sen­gers

By chang­ing the num­ber, you will lose the abil­i­ty to receive SMS. There­fore, get mes­sen­gers in advance. Prefer­ably those whose account is not strict­ly tied to a phone num­ber.

For exam­ple, the iMes­sage appli­ca­tion on the iPhone, although it uses the Inter­net to trans­fer data, is tied specif­i­cal­ly to the phone num­ber. If you change your num­ber, oth­er users will lose con­tact with you.

But Face­book Mes­sen­ger, with all the short­com­ings of this appli­ca­tion, is not asso­ci­at­ed with a spe­cif­ic num­ber in any way, and there­fore is a good choice for trav­el­ers.

Pre­pare Google Trans­late for your jour­ney

Google Trans­late is a very handy trans­la­tor that will help you more than once on a trip abroad. But it must be pre­pared for the jour­ney. Few peo­ple know, but the appli­ca­tion can trans­late even with­out an inter­net con­nec­tion. To do this, you should down­load lan­guage data­bas­es in advance.

Go to the appli­ca­tion set­tings and select “Offline trans­la­tion”. Then down­load the lan­guages ​​you want, includ­ing, of course, your own.

Pre­pare Google Maps

The same applies to the map­ping ser­vice Google Maps. Maps work great offline, but for this they need to be down­loaded first. Go to the appli­ca­tion set­tings, select “Offline maps”, then — “Select map”. Indi­cate on the map a frag­ment of the area, the data of which must be loaded into the smart­phone’s mem­o­ry. As prac­tice shows, loaded cards do not “weigh” that much. For exam­ple, a piece of Italy, includ­ing Rome and Flo­rence, will take about 300 megabytes.

Stock up on adapters

Mod­ern trav­el­ers rarely leave charg­ers at home. But they often for­get that dif­fer­ent coun­tries have dif­fer­ent sock­ets. Find out in advance which sock­ets are com­mon in the coun­try where you are going and get the appro­pri­ate adapter. Or bet­ter yet, sev­er­al.