I did London in June with no data and no hotel WIFI and it wasn’t terrible. In retrospect, I should have gotten a pay-as-you-go data SIM card to put in my unlocked Android phone, and then shared the connection with my travel mates. There are mobile shops all over that sell SIM cards. I have no idea if they’ll work in your ipad. As I said, we just went with the free WIFI as we could find it.
There was lots of free wifi, but most of it required entering an email address, so prepare a throw away account or some such. Actually though, I’ve not gotten any spam from any of the free providers I had to register to use. The best, most reliable service I could get was the free wifi being installed in some of the tube stations. The biggest issue, and the reason for saying I would have gotten a data SIM card, was there was no free wifi available from where I was staying. It was fine to be able to check websites and stuff while out and about, but email back in the hotel was inconvenient. The hotel owned pub would give out an hour of wifi with a pint…
I did rely a lot on the Tripadvisor app with offline information for London. That allowed travel and eating planning when no reliable connection was available.
Even if they allow unlimited use for a flat price, your bill will still show how much you’re using. Go look at several recent bills and I hope you’ll get some sense of how much you’ve been using.
I am very curious why only one lone poster mentioned this. It was the first thing I thought of.
I honestly don’t know the numbers of bytes in those picture advertisements, but if you think that the actual text of the email is the only thing you’ll get charged for, then you’re in for a shock.
Oh, calm the fuck down. I mentioned it also, noting that if the OP accesses his email via a web-based interface, that this will involved further bandwidth overhead.
Anyway, it’s been mentioned. I’m not sure what you accomplish by your dramatic, large-font exclamation on the subject.
Even funnier, when I was on vacation I uploaded my pictures for the day into my newiPad. We left everything plugged in and charging while we slept. I got up in the morning to find the message “you have used your quota of iCloud storage”.
Yikes!! When I bought the new iPad, and a new iPhone, I signed up for iCloud as a means to back up the iPhone details (contacts, etc.). I may have signed up with the iPad too. I suppose I left the “sync with iCloud” on. Over the night, it automatically uploaded 5GB of data.
Made me glad that the hotel did not meter internet; that Apple thoughtfully did not do this (i’m told) over the 3G network; and that I did not have a 3G iPad. at $30 for 120MB, that’s about $1250 for 5GB.
Oh, and I also noticed that the network SIM card I got for my old iPhone 3 - I cleverly forgot to turn off data. (I turned off data ROAMING, but the SIm card was local). It used a few dollars of data before I happened to pull the wrong way on the unlock screen and got that notification bar with scrolling stock prices. Huh? Good old Apple, I got that be default… Then I got Arabic warnings about something that the hotel clerk thought was saying I had to recharge my SIM card with more money.
How many times has an app asked you if it can use locatoin data? Do you know what those apps do under the hood?
So my biggest concern with by-the-byte charges is that you have no idea what the iWhatever is sending or not sending. Something tells you you have updates to your apps, the weather, etc. That requires SOME bytes. If you are the type that downloads every stupid app offered, you may have a chatty one that you do not even know about…
My wife’s iPhone, and a co-worker’s, have both had very weird bills where one day they used about 2/3 of their montly data allotment. Billing error or runaway app?
Since accessing e-mail through a web page is in fact accessing a web page, I kind of thought my response covered all the bases. I guess I needed a larger font
Yes, you did “cover all the bases,” but with all due respect, it is my opinion that your information is a bit contradictory and could be misleading. Almost no one nowadays ever gets or sends a text-only email of less than 1 KB, because the great majority of us use web pages which are cluttered with pictures and ads. The logo of the email provider will be a cached image to save usage, but the ads are always changing. (I imagine dedicated non-browser email readers - such as Outlook - to be the main exception.)
That’s why I counted you among the four posters (mhendo in posts #3 and #5, chrisk in #6, dracoi in #8, al27052 in #18) who described the typical email as using extremely small amounts of one’s quota. And I felt a need to balance that, and that’s why I used the large font.
As a side of derail, is it common in the UK and/or Europe (or maybe just London) to not have free wifi in the hotels? In the US, most hotels have free wifi, and generally only the more expensive hotels make you pay. It seems backwards, but the idea is that if someone is already paying $300+ a night for a room, they aren’t going to quibble over an extra $10-$30 a day for wifi.
Generally, I find the top end hotels love to charge you for Wifi - $15 a night or something; plus for local phone calls and $4 a chocolate bar and $5 a can of Coke. It’s just free money for them, and those paying $200/night (what, $500/night in London?) don’t care or are on expense account.
But do most people on their phones use the web mail interface? Maybe I’m very unusual, but I’d imagine a lot of people use the mail apps on their phone to access the mail. I’ve almost never seen an iPhone user not use the mail app unless they were trying to get to mail too old to be on the phone.
Also, I don’t think the EXTREMELY large font was really necessary. You could have made your point in half the size.
I encounter this frequently enough. My guess is that it’s just another permutation of the people afraid of computers and afraid of change. They’re used to the webmail interface on their PC, so that’s what they use on their phone. This isn’t shoulder surfing that I notice it, but when dealing with coworkers. I offer to setup work email for them in the phone’s native app, and many will refuse, saying that the web interface is good enough.
So far this month (21 days in) my phone’s email app has used 35MB of data total. I’d say it’s been a light month though, as I’ve not spent any significant time without easy access to a PC, nor have I sent pictures or attachments from my phone. 130MB would be enough to do text email from a native ipad app, if downloading of pictures and attachments was turned off. I think for $30 though, the OP can find a solution which allows full Internet access.
Everytime I go abroad, I map out where the nearest McDonald’s or Starbucks are, and use them to get my fill of free wi-fi. If the hotel offers it, even for a pay service, I’m inclined to just dole out the $10 a day. Or go to the lobby where it’s usually free and unsecured.
Who wants to deal with the web interface on a phone or even iPad? The built-in email app on the iPad/iPhone/etc. is much easier to use for quick reading and replies.
I suppose you are speaking from experience, though. I’ve just never thought of anyone doing this.
I use the mail interface on the iPad, so I dont go to yahoo or hotmail, but when I checked my email earlier, I realized how many emails themselves were graphic heavy. I should unsubscribe from a lot, but most department stores have a lot of images, groupon has some, the cat pictures my aunt sends can be pretty large, so even without the yahoo banners and such I’ve gotta lot coming in.
The hotel charges £15 a night for it, so for $25 or so I will have it. It’s annoying but it’s better than gng over. Thanks for all your help.
