Take Your Phone with You on Holiday
Your smartphone can be an excellent tool to enhance your trip this summer. Motivation advises on apps and practical areas of use that will make your holiday even better.
First things first – start by placing the email icon as inaccessible as possible. It shouldn’t be the first thing you see when you open the phone.
If you travel abroad – don’t forget to change settings for Data roaming and Cellular data. It looks different on different phones, but is often found under Settings. Being online all the time can be an expensive story.
Guidebooks – via the iBooks store and the Amazon Kindle store, you can buy good travel literature for your phone before you travel. Lonely Planet city guides cost a bit, but it can be worth the price. Among other things, they have maps that you can drive offline.
Google Maps also works offline if you download them in advance. You can do that on the hotel’s wi-fi before heading out into town.
Download the photo app Instagram if you want to share photos you take on your trip. From there you can easily share to Facebook, Twitter and Tumblr or other places.
Via the iMovie app, you can also take movies and share to YouTube from your phone.
There are many fun photo apps that allow you to take panoramic photos. Photo-synth is an example. The app combines multiple photos you take into one and you can experiment and get fun photos that cover more than a regular photo.
A good tip is also to take pictures of important documents you have with you on the trip, such as driver’s license, passport, your payment card and tickets with departure times and flight numbers. Invaluable if something gets lost along the way. To protect private data, you can download additional protection, such as the Stash Pro app. If you want to be even more sure that no one can access your secret information, but still like to have it in a format other than paper, you can also upload images of them to Drop Box or other similar services in the cloud. Then you can access them from any computer, provided you remember your password.
Your phone is also a book. Buy and download books that you can read on the trip.
Other practical functions that you can benefit from are time adjustment, video calls via Skype, Teams or Zoom (over wi-fi in the hotel to keep costs down), check your bank account, buy tickets for various events and means of transport, check in on the flight, convert currencies, play games and search for information about the destination.
