Indispensable Travel Tool #3: Smartphone

In a recent post I mentioned that there were several travel tools that were absolutely indispensable during our week and a half-long trip to Italy.  I suppose the trip would have been possible without them, but they made it much easier and more enjoyable.  In this series of posts, I’ll examine each of those tools in detail.

I hate to date myself, but I can remember standing in queues at airports, waiting for pay phones to become available.  If you’re under the age of 25 or so, this is Stone Age-type stuff, I realize, but cell phones – and their beefed up Smartphone cousins – haven’t always existed.

My BlackBerry Tour is a great example of the functionality a smartphone offers; it’s a music player, a GPS device, a currency converter, note taker, trip planner, photo viewer, expense tracker,  and an impromptu flashlight.  I’m not done, though: it’s also an alarm clock, a restaurant-business-movie theater-gas station-and more locator, an internet browser, a camera, and oh yeah, it’s a phone that’s capable of working virtually anywhere in the world.

I can’t imagine traveling without it.

Prior to our trip to Italy (with a stopover in London), I had it configured to work in both the UK and Italy.  When we hit the ground I’d turn it on, and in a minute or two it’d be ready for making calls or browsing the internet.

Note:  this is my company cell phone, and for the record, I repaid the company for the charges I incurred while traveling.  All told, including a couple of data charges, it cost $75 and change for our 10 day trip, and I used the phone extensively.  It was worth every penny, as far as I’m concerned.  Making restaurant reservations, calling our hotel in Sorrento from Rome to check on something, double checking train and ferry schedules, tracking expenses,- you name it, it worked flawlessly and was a godsend.  One other thing, and this may horrify some of you – I used it to keep my work email In Box relatively clean and uncluttered, deleting emails I didn’t need or care about, and responding to a few here and there.  If I hadn’t, I would have had 700+ emails in my In Box upon my return to the office; as it was, I had maybe 50 or 60.

In an upcoming post I’ll review some of the apps I use to make my BlackBerry Tour a powerful travel and business tool.

People are fond of talking about the “good old days,” but there was nothing good about standing in a line in a crowded airport, waiting to plunk a quarter into a crappy pay phone.