Travel Equipment

By Chuck Hajdu

On my recent two week trip to Europe I took great pains to select the perfect electronic equipment to accompany me. I had taken different cameras, lenses, phablets and laptops/netbooks on various shorter trips during the year to gauge their effectiveness for my purposes. Each product had to meet certain stringent requirements that I set up to evaluate them in order to make the cut.

What I eventually settled on was projected to be the best combination of products available to me for the trip. Here's what I took, what the criteria were for their selection and how things worked out:

Phones
Criteria: The USA and Europe use different cell phone systems that aren't, for the most part, compatible. I needed to have cell phones available for my trips to and from my gateway airport, ATL, and wanted to be able to have service once I got to Europe by switching SIMs. The equipment that was on hand included an ancient CDMA Cingular flip-phone on a pre-pay plan, a Sprint Windows semi-smartphone (is Windows ever really "smart"?) an LG Revolution from Verizon and an AT&T Samsung Galaxy SII.

The LG looked like the ideal USA phone (it has always performed perfectly for me) and the Galaxy should be great for Europe. Since all of my criteria were met, I packed both phones and a charger (only one was needed) for the trip.

Here's how things worked out: terrible. All of my planning was for naught. Yes, both phones worked as phones in the US but neither worked for internet access, even in ATL. They both had worked fine earlier in the day so I was frustrated.

Finally we landed in Paris and a man in front of me did exactly what I planned to do. He switched SIMs and had a Europe-phone! The only problem was that I didn't have the time to find a cellular store in CDG and I was headed for a cruise ship. By the time I was able to find a cellular store the trip was half over and I was in Istanbul. I just decide to drop the whole idea.

And the Navigator app struggled to find my location because it couldn't find any GPS or WiFi for most of the trip.

Grade: D-