Before you head out on an international adventure, check with your mobile phone provider to find out what its rules are for roaming voice, data, and text message (SMS) use. See if they have roaming plans that you can add temporarily.
Why? When you travel to another country, your phone will do its best to connect to a phone network in that country anytime it needs to transfer data, such as checking your e-mail if you have your phone configured to do that on a schedule (including push e-mail). The price of roaming connections (whether for voice, data, or SMS) is often extremely high—$50 per megabyte (MB) of data transfer or $1.50 per text message isn’t unheard of—and it adds up rapidly.
Quite often, phone providers will have international text message packages that let you use SMS to keep in touch with people back home at greatly reduced rates. If you want to play it really safe, you should disable the phone function completely. On most Windows Mobile phones, you can do this by going into the Wireless Manager and either turning off the phone connection or selecting “Airplane Mode.” If your phone has Wi-Fi, that’s another option for checking your e-mail and accessing the web.
You don’t want to be one of those people with a horror story about getting a $5,000 phone bill after a vacation, so if you want to use e-mail and access the web while you’re on vacation, do a bit of research first. A little advance planning can help make international mobile phone use free of expensive surprises!