To find the best beach bar, the shortest way back to the hotel or to capture the most beautiful holiday moments in photos: Nowadays, many people can hardly imagine their holidays without their smartphones. Travelers should follow these tips to ensure that their trusty pocket companion doesn’t suddenly give up the ghost, refuse to work or suddenly run out of data volume.
The most important thing is of course the power supply. Having a power bank with you that has enough capacity for several full charges of the cell phone can therefore be essential – especially if you are out in nature for a long time and do not know exactly when you will be in front of the next socket. It goes without saying that you shouldn’t forget your charging cable in these moments. To be on the safe side, it’s worth taking several cables with you in case one is damaged. Depending on the holiday destination, it is also important to have packed the right adapter for the socket. Holidaymakers should definitely clarify in advance of their trip whether this is necessary and which adapter is the right one.
It is not only advantageous to have a backup of your mobile phone data before you go on holiday. Because it doesn’t matter whether at home or abroad: in case of doubt, a mobile phone can get lost or stolen. To prevent emergencies, Android and iOS users generally have two options. They either use the backup function integrated on the smartphone via the cloud services “Google One” or “iCloud” or create the backup on a computer or laptop. The advantage of a cloud backup is obvious, in the event of loss, the most important data is always available and can be synchronized with another smartphone. However, the free storage is usually not enough to create a complete backup: Google provides its users with 15 gigabytes of free cloud storage, Apple five gigabytes. Meanwhile, the prices for memory upgrades are identical: 200 gigabytes cost 2.99 euros per month, two terabytes 9.99 euros.
At the latest when this worst case occurs, vacationers have to download large amounts of data. This should definitely be done in the WLAN instead of via mobile data. Because there are no longer any roaming fees within Europe, but the cross-border data volume is usually limited to one gigabyte. Therefore, apps that you download especially for your vacation, as well as videos, series, films and music, should either be downloaded in advance or at least via the hotel WiFi. This also applies to offline map material as well as dictionaries or other larger data sets. As a rule, it is worth buying a local SIM card for longer trips abroad outside the European Union and beyond – depending on the country you can get away with it much cheaper, because outside of Europe the exorbitant roaming fees still exist.
