Will an I Phone suffice for Travelling in Overseas or is a Tablet superior

Yes, they will but I'd be turning the Global roaming off and disabling all functions that use data (like your nav program/weather/time etc)other than the phone itself. If not you might come home to a nasty phone bill of many thousands of dollars. Set it for wirless hotspots only so you can go to a cafe or Maccas and use free wireless internet.

Global data roaming has the capacity to cost you a bomb without you knowing it.Check with your provider. I was able to do internet banking, surf the net and respond to EO posts on my HTC phone in Greece, Cyprus, London, and the US/Canada.

The other option is to buy a local SIM card there andn use it while in country.

Cheers Mick

As long as you don't want to do anything requiring a bigger screen, the Samsung will do everything you want. Best take your spectacles though!

Not sure but I think you can buy a pay as you go sim card in UK which will keep the costs down also.

The only tip i can give you is purchase the smart phone in the place you will spend the bulk of your time. The reason for this, i spent 2 weeks in the USA with an IPone with loads of data & international roam. The Iphone was only used for mapping ie GPS & accessing google for location of places.
We got home to a phone bill for 2thousand bucks ouch, we had purchased a cheep phone for all our US calls.
We asked all the questions from our service provider but they would not give use any advise other than international roam. We think the only way to avoid the big bills is to only use the smart phones in free wifi zones.

Hope this helps

David

A tablet can (slightly more easily) take a local SIM, so you buy it when you arrive in the UK and/or Spain and flick it when you return to Oz.

A tablet also has a more useful screen for viewing possible destinations, intricate internet banking and, if using 3G, should be more secure. This shouldn't put you off using wifi when available, but be wise, especially around how your email is set up.

Last time I was in Europe, I bought a Vodafone SIM in the UK, which allowed for low-cost European roaming inc Spain for no extra cost. There are other companies that specialise is various roaming pre-paid SIMS - Google will help.

Use Skype for international calling as it's almost always cheaper than even local SIMs and also allows for secure connection.

A Galaxy Tab or iPad would be great and serve you well here. You can do the above with a smartphone, but "unlocking" your phone to allow a new SIM in it can be a faff with your operator.

*His desire to sell you a phone will likely be steered by the larger commission he would get from a phone contract sale than a straight tablet sale...

Hi Mark,

We were in Europe (UK, France and Italy) for 2 months early last year. We survived with an iPhone using locally purchased sims (O2 in the UK and Orange in France). I would take an iPad next time because purchasing data for a phone in France was problematic at the time. Where is it is much easier to purchase data for an iPad. Not an issue for you as you are not visiting France. In the UK it was as simple as walking into an O2 shop and purchasing a prepaid card. I think I invested a total of 25 pounds into a sim that gave me 4 weeks of data and phone. Given a friend had returned from 4 weeks in the UK with a $2300 telstra bill for international roaming I was pretty pleased with the cost.

I would definity take a tablet next time but I survived with a phone. The mapping and public transport apps that you can get for your smart phone make the trip a whole lot more pleasurable IMHO.

Cheers

Geoff

Thank you Mick, Tim, Geoff, David & Notso

Hi Mark,

I am dumb when it comes to smartphones etc. All I can say is we were in Europe in Sept/Oct and used our (old) mobile for texting and and a few local calls. We are with Telstra and all our texts were 75 cents. Very long texts will cost more.

We also had a netbook which was used for Wifi which was free just about everywhere we were, even in little villiages in Andalucia, unlike Australia where you pay through the neck. We also download all our ebooks onto the netbook and John finds it very satisfactory as a reader. I copy my books from it to an ereader.

We also took our Nuvi loaded with Europe maps and used it a bit in Croatia and Spain but it takes a while to figure out where it is if you are moving around a lot and don't use it constantly. Once we got to England and hired a car it was brilliant. We found good quality plastic coated maps quite sufficient for a week in Paris.

Have a wonderful time.

Min

Hi Mark

If you can get a copy of the Oct 2011 Aust Personal Computer mag somewhere, they had an article on the options available for overseas data, including pre-paid and modem options. (page 82). One of the options there should match what you want.

Cheers, John

wouldnt this be a better topic for a tech forum than an exploreoz forum?