How to Prepare for a Trip (Part 2)

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Take advantage of your smartphone’s capabilities

Your smartphone can greatly enhance your travel experience and make life on the road more convenient. Complete as many of the following preparations as you can before your next trip.

Activate international roaming

Your first task is to ensure that you can call and be called through your mobile phone when you are overseas. The surest way to do this is to activate international roaming on your mobile number. Before traveling abroad, contact your service provider and ask them how to get international roaming.

International roaming allows you to make long distance phone calls from abroad through your smartphone and instant access to the Internet via your smartphone’s mobile data. Compared to the alternatives mentioned below, international roaming is very convenient and more reliable. However, such convenience comes at a steep price, so resort to it only when the suggested alternatives have failed.

For more on international roaming and lower-cost alternatives, please read this article:

Travel Iike a local in Japan with the help of your smartphone (Part 2)

Install messaging apps

Calling or texting in the traditional way is expensive, especially if done overseas. You can call or text for free with Viber, WhatsApp, Messenger and other messaging apps whenever your smartphone is connected to the Internet.

Before your trip, find out which messaging apps your friends, family and colleagues use. Download the apps into your smartphone from Google Play (for Android phones) or the App Store (for Apple devices).

To set up these apps, you may be required to provide your mobile number and/or your email address. If you don’t have an email address, you can get one for free from Google, Microsoft, Yahoo and other reputable companies.

Before your trip, make a few test calls and exchange some test messages with the people you are likely to talk to from overseas to make sure that everything works.

Back up your smartphone

Losing or breaking your smartphone is a real possibility, so it’s smart to have a backup of your smartphone’s data and settings. The backup will enable you to set up a new smartphone and recover your contacts, pictures, and videos quickly.

The major smartphone manufacturers offer backup for free. For example, there’s iCloud for Apple users and Samsung Cloud for Samsung users. These cloud services will back up not just your pictures and videos, but also your text messages, calendar appointments and phone settings. To set up your smartphone manufacturer’s backup service, go to your smartphone’s Account settings.

If the manufacturer’s free backup is too small for your needs, you can opt to pay a subscription fee to get more storage. Or, you can get additional free storage by using Google Drive, Microsoft OneDrive and other third-party cloud storage services. Just download and set up their apps on your smartphone. Google Drive currently offers 15GB of free storage, while OneDrive offers 5GB. They, too, offer bigger storage space for a fee or as part of a service bundle. For example, my subscription to Office 365 comes with 1TB of OneDrive cloud storage.

Unlike your smartphone manufacturer’s cloud storage, a third-party cloud service may not be able to back up your phone’s settings (such as your WiFi passwords, home and lock screen layout and theme, wallpaper, icon style, apps and app settings, etc.), calendar appointments and text messages.

If the smartphone manufacturer offers only a small amount of free cloud storage, use your smartphone manufacturer’s cloud service to backup only your phone’s settings, contacts, calendar and text messages, and use a third-party service such as Google Drive or OneDrive to back up big files such as photos, movies and documents.

In case the worst happens and you need to quickly set up a new smartphone, get the same brand of smartphone as the one that was lost or damaged. This is because you won’t be able to log on to your old smartphone manufacturer’s backup/restore service from a different brand of smartphone.

How to backup documents

The above-mentioned cloud services may not automatically back up documents. To back up a text file, spreadsheet, presentation slides, pdf or other document, you can copy it to your computer, or email it to yourself, or upload it manually to cloud storage.

Have a backup mobile device

The ultimate backup for your smartphone is another mobile device that is already set up and tested. Set up all your essential apps in another smartphone or a tablet and bring it along for the trip.

If you don’t have a backup smartphone, consider buying one. A backup phone doesn’t have to be an expensive, high-end model.

Set up online banking

Wouldn’t it be great if you could monitor your bank accounts, pay bills, transfer money and conduct other financial transactions while you are traveling overseas? If you want to be able to do this, enroll your savings or checking account in online banking. You must do this before leaving town because your bank may need you to physically visit them to sign a document or provide additional information about yourself.

After enrolling in online banking, download and setup your bank’s mobile app on your smartphone.

If you plan to leave your computer at home, then enroll all the bills you intend to pay online before your trip. This is because you may have to log on to your bank from a computer to enroll certain types of bills.

Set up a home security camera

Finally, if you have an old, unused smartphone, don’t let it go to waste. Set it up as a home security camera. It will enable you to check your home from afar, give you peace of mind and allow you to focus on enjoying your trip. In case something goes wrong at home, you will have a video record of what happened.

You can read about how I used my old smartphones as home security cameras in this article: How to turn your smartphone into a home security camera

More smartphone-related travel ideas can be found here: Travel Iike a local in Japan with the help of your smartphone

Related articles:

How to Prepare for a Trip (Part 3) suggests some important preparations

How to Prepare for a Trip (Part 4) introduces a travel kit

How to Prepare for a Trip (Part 1) focuses on luggage-related tips.

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