Traveling with your Android devices

Just got back from a lovely tropical holiday so I thought I would post some tips for less frequent travelers. Because we like to go to the South Pacific, we aren't as connected as we are when we travel in the Canada, US, Mexico zone. We have to deal with expensive data plans and different voltages.

All we take for 2 to keep in touch

Times have certainly changed. From lugging around a laptop or notebook with a bunch of transformers and adapters to ... this. The white adapter was $8 at a local shop. The transformer and cables are ones I carry all the time. The Samsung transformer does fast charging - my 2200 mAH battery charges in a couple hours. My Galaxy Nexus is great for playing games or tracking and the 7" Tab 2 doubled as an e-reader and was what we used most of the time for accessing the internet.

Internet access has changed as well for the Cook Islands. When we first went we had to log onto a business station with a password. Everyone has moved to WiFi. Internet was expensive; $15/100 MB on Rarotonga and $24/80MB and $9/30MB. First time we even turned on the tablet we burned through 40 MB updating apps and all sorts of other stuff that just didn't work well.

On to the tips :

1. Update all your devices the day before you leave then turn off automatic updating - especially if you are going to a country that the Play Store doesn't support.
2. Turn off automatic uploads to G plus, dropbox, etc. - this can really suck up data.
3. Consider turning off your location.
4. Put any apps to manual update that you can - weather, email etc.

These may seem like simple things to do but a lot of the newer apps, especially from the Play Store, expect you to stay in your zone:)

We were not on this ship

Next year I'll be getting a SIM card from CI Telecom. For $50 I'll get 100MB data, 20 minutes and 200 texts, including international. They may even have faster internet as they are looking at transitioning to a closer satellite. Cool.