7 Essential Smartphone Holiday Tips

7 Essential Smartphone Holiday Tips

If you’re heading abroad this summer, your smartphone will most probably be coming with you. However, before jetting off it’s important to make sure your phone is fully prepped for international travel.

Here, we share our seven top tips for how to prepare your smartphone for an overseas jaunt.

Scope out hotspots before you go

When heading overseas you can either turn to data roaming stick to WiFi. With a bit of research and planning before you travel, you can often find plenty of bars and cafés that offer free WiFi to their customers, so you can get online without worrying about the impact on your data allowance.

Back up before you leave

These days we tend to carry our life around on our phones. Before jetting off, it could be a clever idea to back up your device to a cloud system (Dropbox, Google Drive) or an external hard drive, so you have all your precious photos and important contacts safely stored away should your phone decide to take a dip in the pool with you.

Data roaming

Everyone wants to get online when abroad, whether it’s to sat-nav your way around a new town, or post updates of your adventures on social media. To keep your bill in check, be sure to check in with your network to see what international plans are available on your tariff. If you’re travelling within Europe you can use your data at no extra cost, but further afield will require activating a roaming plan, or purchasing a bolt-on.

Find My Phone

Language barriers can make things difficult if you manage to lose your phone while you’re away. Using a Find My Phone app is a good way to work out if you’ve left your phone on the beach or back at the hotel room. iPhones will already have Find iPhone installed, whilst Android users can Google 'find my phone' to locate a handset synced with that Google account. Both will enable you to locate your phone and play a sound, or even lock and disable the phone if you think it’s been stolen.

Google Translate

Although you may have the best of intentions to learn some local words and phrases before you head off, chances are it won’t ever happen. Luckily, with the Google Translate app – available on both Android and apple – you’ll never be caught short by a road sign, notice, or menu again. Just point your camera at what you need translating, and Google will display the English equivalent on your screen. Additionally, a voice-recognition audio mode makes two-way speech possible in up to 32 languages, while a text type mode can assist with 103 languages.

Turn off push notifications

Although great for keeping us up to date, push notifications aren’t helpful when you need to keep a close eye on your data allowance. Depending on how many apps you have on your device, these automated text updates can drain your data allowance in a matter of hours. You can turn these notifications off in your device’s settings. Here’s how:

Turning off push notifications on iPhone:
Go to Settings > Notifications and you will be able to individually turn off notifications for each app.

Turning off push notifications on Android:
The process of turning off push notifications varies between each version of Android. This handy guide explains how to disable push notifications on multiple Android devices.

Find the perfect smartphone for you on a range of low-cost tariffs over at mobiles.co.uk.