Forget your PC, switch to a smartphone

I spent last week in Poland as a visiting professor at the Budcoszcz University of economy (http://www.uk.wsg.byd.pl/index.php?id=53&submenu=1). I flew from helsinki to Warsaw by plane and then traveled four hours on the train to Bydgoszcz. I decided to experiment and travel lightly with a backpack and no pc, just my Nokia E7 smartphone.

I was very carefull with the data roaming and continuously monitoring the log file to see how much data I had used. The Nokia map application was not practical. Downloading the map required so much data and was actually rather expensive. I turned to using sports-tracker.com. On the return trip I walked around the old town of Warsaw with the sportstracker on and taking pictures. These were easy to upload onto my facebook profile and hence share my route and pictures. I also tried to attach the link here, but sportstracker is presently not available (I wonder what is happening).

During my stay in Poland and whilst lecturing, I made a YouTube video of an experiment I wanted to show my students. this video is available at http://www.youtube.com/user/Villesaar?blend=7&ob=5. The size of the video is c 380 Mb. Uploading this by a mobile connection whilst roaming in Poland would have been very expensive c 400 Euro´s. Hence I believe the Eu comission will still have to do something more to ensure that dataroaming prices will become more reasonable http://ec.europa.eu/information_society/activities/roaming/data/index_en.htm . In the airport I saw people switching sim card on their I phone. I also heard that there are good applications which will allow you to switch of 3 g and allow wlan only whilst abroad. I did not find this application on my NokiaE7 (yet), but I am sure there is a strong market need for it.

I also used my mobile phone as a memory stick. However when connecting it to a computer in Poland the computer did not recognise the phone. This was a pitty and means that in practice I can not rely on the mobile phone as my only datastorage device whilst travelling.

All in all, I was satisfied having left my pc at home, when travelling. Will also do the same when travelling abroad next time round. I am sure the data-roaming tarrifs will come down or my ability to choose wlan only will become better. I am sure service focusing on a traveller with a mobile device (mobile tailored pages) will become more common. there is a huge market opportunity, which the operators and service providers could tap into, if they get their act right (i.e. data roaming prices and mobile tailored pages and services).