12 Days of ‘Staircase Wit’ for 2013 (Day 12)
Treppenwitz or perhaps more correctly ‘l’esprit de l’escalier’ is the expression for when you think of the perfect thing to say, but long after the moment you should have said it. In this series of blogs I given myself a second chance to comment or correct topics I’ve covered this year.
December
How I Saved £26,750 On My Phone Bill Whilst On Vacation
Here’s an update to my tips and tricks for avoiding mobile “bill shock” when returning from vacation.
The high cost of roaming data was a biggest factor in (potentially) large mobile phone bill for my vacation. So great news that here in the UK Three is bringing local rates to more countries (US, Indonesia, Sri Lanka, and Macau) for roamers.
On our worst days we were consuming more that 1 GB of mobile data. There's definately a market for big data users, so for those in the market check out this tariff from EE: the ‘petabyte plan’ . No mention of roaming though.
One thing I forgot to mention was how we initially almost came unstuck with our plan to rely on Waze (iOS app) for navigation.
What I'd forgotten was that Waze is primarily a commuter's app. I'd bumped in to this a few times before, with the app unable to route be from my home to the airport in the early days, and on cross-countries trips in the US were routes were too long to be supported. But the other aspect I'd forgotten is that it designed for local commuters. I'd never noticed this in the US, as I switch backforth between US English and Real UK English all day long.
So when we first started Waze and were presented with a map where all street and place names were in Hebrew (and later Arabic). And whilst you could search in 'english' the spelling of placenames was inconsistent at best. Thankful the 'Search using Google' mitigated the language issues, and we good for the rest of the trip.
Perhaps one of the reasons my phone bill is so low when I’m at home is that I’m frequently lost for a signal in London. A common theme for many of my blogs. The answer seems to be this.
Mobile’s Growing Role in Corporate Social Responsibility
In the final blog of the year I looked at how mobile is playing its role in CSR. One mobile app that I missed was Google's charity donation app. Currently US only, and you find out more about here.