Digital Survival - SIM card

Travelling with your mobile phone

katie — Thu, 03 Feb 2011 11:50:58 +0000

Mobile phones are incredibly useful to have when travelling – however, using your phone in another country (or even another region of the same country) can be expensive.

Here are some things to keep in mind if you are going to travel:

Will your mobile phone actually work? If you have a quad band phone, this shouldn't be a problem (see the section on Bands, above, for more about this).
What will it cost to use your phone on a different network? Your mobile phone provider will charge you a premium price for leaving their network and using another. Before you travel, check the per-minute price for receiving and making calls, and for sending and receiving SMS messages, at your destination. Any data or internet services will also be charged at a premium rate. If these prices are prohibitive, you may want to consider using a local SIM card.
Use a local SIM card. Many mobile phone providers sell SIM cards for pay-as-you-go services. If you are going to have a high volume of calls while you are abroad this is a very affordable option, particularly if people in the country you are visiting need to call you on your mobile via a local number. To do this you will need an unlocked phone (see section on unlocked phones). It is best to check to see if this an option before you travel but you will probably need to wait until you reach your destination to buy the SIM card and the number you will be able to use.

Tags:

bands

SIM card

Creating and sharing content using mobile phones

katie — Thu, 03 Feb 2011 10:25:31 +0000

There are now many ways to create and share multimedia (videos, pictures and text) content from your mobile phone, either between phones or via the internet, and reach a broad audience.

Depending on the model of your phone, you can:

Take photos or record videos to document events or provide evidence for advocacy work
Record short interviews
Share images with others via MMS
Send text messages via SMS
Send updates via the internet to micro-blogging sites, such as Twitter
Upload content via the internet onto content-sharing sites, such as YouTube and Flickr, or onto Wordpress blogs

With mobile internet costs falling in some countries, mobile phones are increasingly being used to access the internet while on the move. Some mobile phone providers offer fixed monthly packages for internet use while others sell 'bundles' of mobile data.With a phone that has a wireless internet connection it is also possible to access the internet on your phone through free wireless 'hotspots'. NGOs can take advantage of this by creating specially adapted mobile versions of their websites. There are online services such as Wapple.net and MobiSiteGalore which can help you create mobile-friendly websites. To read a selection of case studies, showcasing a variety of innovative ways that mobile phones have been used by individuals and organisations, visit the Mobiles in-a-box website at http://mobiles.tacticaltech.org/taxonomy/term/4

Challenges

Updating a blog or website with content sent directly from your mobile phone often requires that you pay to sign up with a service outside your country; this means you may be charged the cost of an international message every time you use the service. You may need to connect your mobile phone to a computer to be able to download photos and videos and share them through the internet. The quality of video captured on most mobile phones remains low. Unless you or your organisation are prepared to invest heavily in a high-end mobile phone, the uses of video made on mobile phones may be quite limited. Sending MMS messages (i.e. image or video files from your mobile phone to another mobile phone or to a website) is still extremely expensive in most countries and it doesn't always work.

Tags:

mobile phone

SIM card

The SIM Card

katie — Thu, 03 Feb 2011 10:21:01 +0000

If you remove the back of your mobile phone you will find the battery, underneath which is the SIM card. SIM stands for Subscriber Identity Model and this card is where information about your network provider and your phone number is stored. By moving the SIM card you can move your phone number and stored contacts from one phone to another. This is useful if your phone is broken or damaged, because you can remove the SIM and put it in another phone. You can also put a different SIM card in your phone, and thus use a different phone number. This can be useful when you are travelling and want to use a local number (see the Travelling section).

Tags:

SIM card