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.

For years now, it’s been unfortunate that Eye-Fi doesn’t make a Compact Flash (CF) version of their Eye-Fi camera cards for professional DSLR cameras that lack the consumer appropriate SD card slots.

However, the latest Eye-Fi cards do work with proper SD/CF adapters in CF based DSLR cameras, at least the set of items I have work fine:
Canon EOS 7D 18 MP CMOS Digital SLR Camera

Eye-Fi Pro X2 8 GB Class 6 SDHC Wireless Flash Memory Card EYE-FI-8PC

SD/SDHC/SDXC to High-Speed Extreme UDMA mode CF Type II Adapter support 16/32GB and over 64GB Sells for under $15.

I think the key to making this work is the adapter. Not all adapters are created equal, and this one appears to be pretty fast, and doesn’t block the WiFi signal. I’ve seen numerous comments from others saying the Eye-Fi won’t work in the Canon 7D, or other DSLRs that are CF based. Hopefully this clears up some confusion, especially when it comes to what’s needed in a Compact Flash Adapter.

The SDHC Eye-Fi card has a max speed of 6MB/s (48mbps), which is too slow for 1080p on the Canon 7D, but plenty fast for taking pictures (either not in burst mode, or for short bursts).

The Direct Mode of of the Eye-Fi works great, and is really easy to set up if you understand the basics of what an ad-hoc network is. Better yet, the Eye-Fi app is free for the iPad, iPhone and iPod touch.

Pictures transfer really fast over 802.11n between the Eye-Fi and your iOS device, but will also transfer just fine over 802.11b/g.

Images that get transferred show up in the Eye-Fi iOS app and in the “Camera Roll” photo album. The Eye-Fi app is multitask and push enabled, which means you can have images stream over to your iOS device automatically, and get little badge alerts when they arrive.

It gets better…

You can set up your social networks and photo services like Facebook and Flickr with your Eye-Fi account, so images can go directly from your camera to your iPhone and then over 3G be sent automatically to the sites you want. This also includes having them sent via FTP to your blog or website. All of this can also be manually or semiautomatically set up.

A nice companion app would be Adobe Photoshop Express, also free in iTunes. You can use this app to crop and apply all kinds of effects before uploading to wherever you’d like.

If you think about the workflow here for a second, it’s really pretty cool. Imagine being somewhere and having that perfect scene for a nice Facebook profile update. You can take the picture with your DSLR, transfer it quickly to your iPhone, crop and adjust the image, and then upload to Facebook over 3G, or pretty much anywhere with any number of apps and services.

This could also work well for client previews. Of course if there’s WiFi at the location, you don’t need to be in Direct Mode (the ad-hoc network) and can send the images even faster by going directly to the Internet from the camera where a client could be reviewing the shoot in progress.

I would imagine the other Eye-Fi X2 cards work as well, and that they work in the Canon 5D MKII as well has other DSLRs. I’ll be testing other CF cameras out as I get access to them. Meanwhile, the Eye-Fi X2 Pro is working well in other SDHC based cameras such as the Sony Cyber-shot DSC-HX5V and the Canon SD4000is.

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.