As Metallica sings “…I’ll take my time anywhere. Free to speak my mind anywhere. And I’ll redefine anywhere. - Anywhere I roam, where I lay my head is home …” I took my gadgets and computer with me for a holiday in the sun at the Gran Canary islands. It was time for some getaway from the harsh and cold Norwegian winter.
I landed and got an SMS and thought WTF??? Roaming?
Flickr photo by Terretta
Mobile technology has reach an domestic maturity, the “in your pocket” technology is fairly cheap to use as long as we stay at home, within your state or country. You can check-in with Forsquare/Gowalla, use google maps to search for routes and locations and nearby POI’s. And I can update my facebook status while seeing something interesting. But… it all feels a bit weird, so.. I live here in Oslo, not a big city and i more or less know all the interesting places to go after 40 years in this city, don’t really need google maps to find my way around. I still update my Facebook status tho, and check in with Foursquare because it’s fun. But useful? nope, not really.
What IS useful is being a tourist, when you are somewhere you’ve never been before and be able to lookup google maps without having to pay 5-10 euros to search for each time i’d like to find the nearest cafe or cool place to see.
For the trip i had took my iPad 3G and my wife had her Macbook Pro laptop with her. We’re sorta always working even when we’re on vacation, it’s the way of life working in the IT industry :)
The way of the IT industry has become more and more mobile and now most data and activity done in and kept in the cloud. Everything you do more or less involves some sort of network activity. As a traveler is a bummer…
Upon arrival to the islands my first mobile experience was a auto generated SMS from my carrier Telenor, notifying me about the prices for roaming. It’s a flat Kr 25,- NOK for each MB of downloaded data. $4,2 USD or € 3,1 EUR for each MB, insane prices! So, this is sort of a plea to the carriers, please do something about your pricing structure, We’ve got all this cool consumer technology rendered useless by over pricing. I have no idea how it is defend able to charge $1 for a Forsquare check-in, or $5 for reading my Facebook wall. The consumer end of the mobile technology business has now made the tools that allow us to communicate globally, It’s about time the networking and carrier business start taking their part of the globalization of communication.
While i was on holiday Google released a really cool tool for travelers, Google Translate for iPhone. You can speak a phrase into your phone, and get it translated, and playback the translated phrase in your selected language. I’m not very good at speaking Spanish so this was great. Only problem is that it’ll cost you $2 for each use…
As a final note: I still think Metallica was at it’s best when Cliff was playing.
Featured photo from http://stockmedia.cc
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[...] Well.. that’s just in theory… in practice mobile technology is way to expensive for tourists. With my carrier, Telenor in Norway i have to pay a whopping Kr. 112 NOK per MB of downloaded data in Seattle.. That’s about $20 USD for 1 MB of data, or €14.5 EUR. It’s just INSANE. I was on a trip to Gran Canary a few weeks ago and had a similar experience there. [...]