Vacation

I’m going on vacation soon and have been considering my options for mobile data/Internet in Europe.

Plan A was to prepurchase data from Rogers Wireless as they offer discounts when you do this. Well a 57% savings is great but when the roaming data charges are large enough to be obscene, 57% is still WAY too much. Without trying I use over 100MB/month and will probably use more while traveling. That would cost me over $1,000CA while in Europe.

Plan B involved unlocking my iPhone and getting a prepaid account with a Eueopean provider. Alas I have the 5.09 bootloader and so can’t easily unlock my phone.

Plan C is to either buy a USB modem and unlock it or get one from the European provider I use. Then plug that into the Cradlepoint PHS300 so I can connect my iPhone via WiFi. The advantage of this is that I can take an Eye-Fi with me as well.

Plan D is to use the hotels Internet connection and free hotspots. The disadvantage to this is not having access to the iPhone Map application while wandering around.

So I think Plan D is my obvious default choice but I’m going to try and implement Plan C. My reason for this is that I can get a prepaid data account from O2 with unlimited usage for 40€. The question is whether I can get a reasonably priced GSM data stick. I can get one in Europe for 70€ but I don’t know the make and so can’t confirm it would work with the PHS300. I can also use the PHS300 while at home so the cost for it isn’t single use. I also think it would be pretty neat to have an ongoing photo gallery of my trip that is essentially updated in real time. I’m also considering blogging a bit but may not. I started this post on my iPhone just to test the WordPress application but quickly realized many limitations. If I do post, it will be text only and pretty brief. I’m more likely to tweet frequently from @lcoker.