Kevin J Edwards

I just returned from another major trip with my iPhone (and iPad in hand). This is my 3rd trip with a rented SIM from iPhoneTrip.com and 4th major Flashpacking trip.

See my reviews from previous iPhoneTrip reviews:
Flashpacking into Africa with a Rented SIM from iPhoneTrip.com
Flashpacking through Europe with iPhoneTrip.com
Flashpacking through North America without iPhoneTrip.com

On this trip, we traveled to Auckland, Christchurch, and Queenstown in New Zealand, and in Australia we traveled to Sydney, Ayers Rock, Cairns, Port Douglas, Daintree, The Great Barrier Reef and Brisbane.

Once again, the rented SIM from iPhoneTrip.com worked flawlessly. My girlfriend though she’d go without renting a SIM, but gave up along the way and had a SIM delivered to us at our first hotel. It’s nice to know that they can ship fast anywhere in case there’s a problem, but still I’d highly recommend ordering your SIM to arrive before you leave.

See my previous reviews to see how thoroughly pleased I was iPhoneTrip.com, for cost savings, connectivity and ease of use. Really, I can’t recommend renting their SIMs highly enough. And more importantly, traveling with the full connectivity it gives you will drastically change the way you travel.

That being said, I have to say that connectivity in general in Oceania is pretty bad. Bad, as in “worse than in the United States”. Data rates are low, and charges are high. Far fewer free WiFi locations exists and those that do have data caps on them. Even 5 star hotels and resorts that we stayed at not only charged for WiFi, but had very slow data rates, and often connections timed out or they capped your connections.

As a result, renting a SIM becomes much more beneficial. I found myself giving up on WiFi in every place I traveled to and went back to 3G for speed and connectivity improvements that the iPhoneTrip.com SIM gave me.

Australia is HUGE, and being so big, it’s not reasonable to expect great connectivity throughout the country, but ironically some remote locations we traveled to had pretty decent coverage. For example, bus and helicopter trips around Ayers Rock were just fine with connectivity, but suburbs of Sydney could have weak or dead spots.

Don’t get me wrong, most places you’d travel to in Australia and New Zealand have good enough coverage for email, navigation, and simple web surfing, but for someone like me who uploads and downloads HD video for work, the difference between the incredibly good connectivity in Europe and the poor general connectivity in Oceania was significant and worth pointing out.

Also to be clear, this is a general connectivity issue through the places I went through in Australia and New Zealand. I wouldn’t be surprised if other places were much better. The iPhoneTrip.com SIM can only be as good as the wireless carriers in the areas you travel to, and the SIM did a great job of switching carriers along the way making the iPhoneTrip.com rental SIM your best option, especially since WiFi simply isn’t an option in many places for demanding users.

If you’d like to see the photos from my Oceania trip check out my photo albums on Facebook.

I just returned from another major trip with my iPhone (and iPad in hand). Unfortunately, I didn’t rent a SIM from iPhoneTrip.com.

See my reviews from previous iPhoneTrip reviews:
Flashpacking into Africa with a Rented SIM from iPhoneTrip.com
Flashpacking through Europe with iPhoneTrip.com

My girlfriend and I did a “Noreaster”, traveling through North East America in October/November 2011. We visited Chicago, Niagara Falls, Montreal, Vermont, New York, Philadelphia, Cleveland, and Iowa. Since this was mostly in the United States, we didn’t rent a SIM from iPhoneTrip.com.

In Canada, this was very unfortunate. WiFi sucked, and roaming rates were insane. Fortunately we didn’t stay in Canada long enough for this to be much of a problem, and it was during the weekend, so I didn’t have to work much.

So why this review if I didn’t rent a SIM?

Because one can’t pass an opportunity to point out how far behind our wireless carriers in the United States are from elsewhere in the world. This trip was made with my iPad (on Verizon) and my iPhone (on AT&T). Unlike Europe where I had connectivity everywhere with my iPhoneTrip.com SIM, there were HUGE areas around the Northeast with absolutely no coverage on either Verizon or AT&T.

My point here isn’t just to bash the state our our wireless infrastructure in the United States, but also to point out that when traveling abroad, you can rely more on your mobile technology than you can in the US, making the thought of renting a SIM that much more compelling.

If you’d like to see the photos from my Northeast trip check out my photo albums on Facebook.

From my Monney Car Audio in Redwood City Yelp Review:

Price: 5 out of 5
Friendliness: 5 out of 5
Service: 5 out of 5
Knowledge: 5 out of 5

Monney Car Audio is located at:
2001 Middlefield Road
Redwood City, CA 94063-2830
(650) 299-9991

I had a great experience with this place. Really, just as perfect for service as you can get.

I stopped in on a Monday and explained that I had just purchased a car and really wanted iPhone integration. The owner let me walk around and browse to get a feel for the place without sales pressure.

After telling him what I wanted, he gave me a nice low-priced simple solution. Kind of a “start here” solution. It was pretty inexpensive, but I wanted to find out what other options there were, and if I could possibly afford a killer system.

I was walked through all the options all the way up to the top of the line. I can’t emphasize enough how “no-pressure” there was on this. There was no BS “you need this” or “you have to add that”. He listened to the things that mattered to me, and finally suggested a couple of different models for me to chose from. Not once did he try to upscale me on things I didn’t want or need. For example, the speakers were just fine.

I asked how soon I could get it installed, and he said I could come by the next morning at 10am for same day service. This was great, and I told him I wanted to do my homework and come back if still interested. Still no pressure, he said I could come by or call if I had any questions.

I did a ton of research. I printed out everything I wanted and what the cheapest prices were online. I read online reviews on the products I was interested in, and all the tips and tricks for getting the best out of them.

The next day I returned, much later than when I said I would, and he greeted me warmly. We went over the pricing, and everything seemed perfectly fair and reasonable. My car is a Mercedes, so I really wanted to make sure the work done was first rate.

Here’s where they really deserve a top score: He knew all the insides and outs of both my car and of the stereo. All the research I had done online that was very specific to my car and stereo was all stuff he knew like the back of his hand. I can’t emphasize how important this is. You can have your equipment installed by someone who’s reading the instructions, or you can have it installed by someone who not only reads the instructions but also researches online all the details and issues others have had and has done enough work to know how to do things right. Monney does.

I had other equipment I wanted pulled. Monney was able to do this and still have the car look like new. I really appreciated the attention to detail here.

Although I was really late, it wasn’t a problem. I was offered a ride and a rental car while they worked on it. When I returned, the stereo was perfectly installed without problem and Leo himself went through how the stereo works and waited to see if I had any questions. One problem was with my iPhone itself (Bluetooth), and he knew how to resolve it quickly.

I couldn’t be happier with all of this.

The quality of the work was top-notch.
The in and out was incredibly fast.
They were very knowledgable and friendly.
The *total* price for what I got was better than what I found when I shopped around.

The bottom line, is that there’s a reason why this shop has been so successful in this location as long as it has.

Actually, most of this trip was around Europe, and it mirrored much of the trip I took in March with my iPhone and rented SIM from iPhoneTrip.com.

Besides going into Africa and the Canary Islands / Madeira, there were a couple of differences between this trip and my Europera 2010 Tour. One difference is that I traveled this time with my girlfriend who decided not to rent a SIM from iPhonTrip.com (she came to regret this). By having her tour with just her AT&T SIM, we were able to see the differences very clearly.

Another difference was that we both had iPads with us along with the iPhones. As before, I also had my MacBook Pro. I was able to tether my iPad and my MacBook Pro to my iPhone using the rented SIM from iPhoneTrip.com, and a few times also let my girlfriend tether her iPad and iPhone to help save costs.

Additionally this trip was different in that we traveled by boat, car, and ship in addition to taking the train like the last trip. Here’s the map of our trip:

You can see, we traveled to London, Paris, Berlin, Prague, Vienna, Bratislava, Budapest, Venice, Rome, Florence, Pisa, Genova, San Remo, Monaco, Nice, Cannes, St. Tropez, Marsaille, Arles, Barcelona, Valencia, Madrid, Gibraltar, Tangiers, Seville, Lisbon Cádiz, Seville, Casablanca, Agadir, Gran Canaria, Santa Cruz de Tenerife, Madeira, and Frankfurt.

This trip, there were only two times that I could not connect with my iPhoneTrip.com SIM:
1) The Chunnel (under water tunnel between England and France).
2) While SCUBA diving a ship wreck in the Canary Island.

So ya, other than not working under water 😉 I was always able to get a connection, more often than not, a much better connection than WiFi at the hotels.

I could connect in every other country. The data rates were all incredibly fast. In the end, I used multiple Gigabytes of data, and it cost me thousands of dollars less than what my girlfriend spent using international roaming via AT&T.

While the money savings was great, and significant, the connectivity was what I really cared about. I can’t make trips like this unless I can connect at all times and work on the go. Whether it was compiling a report in Rome, or having a conference call as I crossed the Straight of Gibraltar, I was able to work along the way without having to pause my trip so I could run back to a hotel and work.

I mentioned the driving aspect of this being different. The issue here is that connectivity while driving across foreign countries is extremely helpful for navigation as well as translating foreign signs and finding good places to stop to eat.

One thing that’s really fun when using the iPhoneTrip.com SIM is that “it just works”. You can look at your iPhone and watch the carrier logo just automatically switch over.

This was another magnificent trip that I couldn’t imagine what it would’ve been like without my iPhone along with the rented SIM from iPhonTrip.com.

If you’d like to see the photos from my iPhoneTrip check out my photo albums on Facebook.