Ebook tells how to roam smart with your tablet or smartphone

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ook tells how to roam smart with your tablet or smartphone

Smart phone sales are booming world-wide but strangely - there’s little to tell you how to use these devices successfully while travelling internationally.

Tauranga writer Bryan Winters has put this right with his latest ebook, Android Travel: Roam Smart you’re your Tablet or Smartphone.

“It’s curious to see how little educational material there is on how to travel internationally with these mobile devices,” says Bryan.

“Sales numbers about the smartphone revolution are astounding – commentators tell us it’s projected that by 2016 the Android camp will number 2.3 billion members to top the Microsoft Windows total – and that's not just Microsoft phones and tablets – it includes PCs.”

At the end of 2013, Android was nabbing 65% of global tablet sales and over 80% of smartphones sold worldwide.

Mr Winters says that prompted by his own “incredible, unfortunate experience” (outlined in the attached story), he began writing on the correct way to get an overseas SIM for your phone.

As he and his wife Rosie toured France and Britain, they found there was much more to mobile travelling than simply obtaining a SIM that worked. “We began to turn our smartphone and tablet into a couple of research, planning, driving, walking, photographic and virtual experience machines.”

It's tempting to think you know all that before you leave for your overseas trip, but most of us are unlikely to have set ourselves up properly before heading off, he reckons.

“Or perhaps more importantly, you haven't got your friends and family organised and trained on the systems you will use to communicate free of charge with them.

“That's a costly time-wasting exercise to start on, when you find yourself in a French village, or even the heart of Paris.”

So Mr Winters ebook provides easy-read pictorials on how to set your device up. Take screen folders for example. De-cluttering your smartphone screens is a great start - so you can find what you want amid the apps crowding your phone - useful when you're crammed into a jolting London Tube.

Most of us have heard of shortcuts but don't know the simple steps to set up fast retrieval to items we're interested in, such as a mapped shortcut to find your way back to your hotel.

As for widgets, having the weather of all your planned stops one touch away might just be helpful in deciding what to wear the next day, when you can’t understand a French weather forecast.

Of course the world is full of apps, one million in the Android space. Mr Winters strips this down to essentials, including location-assisting ones, on-the-spot background research apps, and the marvels of the emerging virtual reality ones that enable you to experience, or at least judge a sight ahead of time.

Bryan Winters is well aware you'll probably be reading his ebook on the very device he's teaching you about. So with this mind and taking account of screen sizes, most of the book’s graphics are of smartphones, with tablets sprinkled around.

“On an eight inch Android tablet, that means you're looking at a slightly larger than life version of screens. True, the many graphics have packed the ebook out to around 10MB, but you hardly notice the extra few seconds taken to download it.”

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