Olly wrote to me on Facebook, with some questions about using smart phones as travel tools.
Olly got me thinking. Phones have been on my mind lately. The new generation of $100 smart phones are at the point where they are suitable for use as an only-device. Right now I have a phone and a tablet. Maybe with a slightly bigger, slightly more powerful phone, I could make the tablet redundant..?
(Olly and I met at a hippy festival in Australia. We have become firm friends and shared some memorable bowls of buckwheat porridge sitting on a river bank and talking about philosophy.)

Olly:
Love your blog Emmanuel.  Good stuff.
Where are you now?
I’ve traveled for years as well and there’s a bunch of stuff on your blog I didn’t think about before, like Wikitravel and smartphones and GPS apps.
What’s a good GPS phone to get?

Emmanuel:
G’day Olly!  How are you mate?
I’m in Chiang Mai, Thailand, right now, playing music and generally arseing about.
Thanks for the positive feedback man!  I’m really glad you have found some useful stuff on the blog.

I’ve got a swiss army knife, and it’s pretty damn handy. But my phone; that’s the ultimate multipurpose travel tool.
A smartphone will navigate your journey, find you amazing prices on air tickets, translate foreign languages, just by listening to you speak… the list goes on. They are awesome. And they don’t have to be fragile and expensive.

The best way to go with phones, I reckon, is to grab yourself a cheap Chinese Android.  HTC make good ones.  I am using an HTC Explorer at the moment.  Or if you want to spend a bit more, get a Samsung Galaxy maybe?  They have a very good rep’.  

I like Android devices because of the relatively low price point.  When you buy a phone for a hundred or a couple of hundred bucks, it doesn’t hurt as much when you drop it in a river, or it slips out of your pocket on a crowded bus, never to be seen again.  Iphones are awesome, but they are very pricey.  With a bit of tweaking, a hundred dollar Android device will do everything an Iphone can, and sometimes more. 
When you get a cheap Android phone, the first thing you want to do is ‘root’ it.  Rooting your phone allows you to install a customised operating system, and gives you a lot more control over the way the device behaves.  You will get better battery life, and speedier operation from a rooted phone.  Just Google the name of your device, and the word ‘root’, and you will find simple step by step instructions on the Android forums.

In Laos you can get super cheap Android knock-offs.  They look and operate like brand-name devices, but they retail for about USD$50.00.  I dont know how good they really are, but I had a play with some, and they seem to work well.  I assume the batteries are pretty rubbish, since good batteries are expensive to manufacture.  You could always get a genuine branded battery to put in them instead I suppose…

Best bet is probably to get a known and / or reviewed brand. But buy it online, through Ebay or something like that.  You will definitely save some dollars buying online.  I got my HTC Explorer off Ebay and it has been pretty awesome for US $80.00.
Get a late model device, because they get obsolete pretty quick.   Also, don’t buy a used one, unless it is dirt cheap. Be sure to check, if you buy online that the phone is suitable for use in your part of the world.
Make sure the phone you get has GPS. Some very cheap smart phones don’t.

Once you have a phone with GPS, you just need some cool apps to take full advantage of it.  
Most phones come with Google Maps app pre-installed. Forget about it. Google maps is useless to a low-budget adventurer because it relies on constant connection to the internet to be able to navigate. Mobile internet is expensive. The alternative is Wifi, but you don’t want to be having to pop into a WiFi cafe every time you need to read your map.
You need something that uses GPS alone. GPS is free (at least for now).

‘Map Factor Navigator‘ is my favourite GPS navigation app.  It operates in pretty much the same way that a sat-nav unit in a vehicle does.  The cool thing about Map Factor is that, unlike the Google Maps app, it doesnt require internet at all, once you set it up.  Map Factor allows you to search detailed street maps, and perform real time navigation tasks, using maps stored on the device.  It’s totally free, and you can use it everywhere.  You will never be lost again – unless you want to be. ;-)
When I hitchhike, or am trying to find my way round an unfamiliar city, my smart phone GPS map makes my life so much less sweaty.

A friend of mine has developed a fantastic new app called ‘Pocket Earth‘.  It is available for the Iphone already, and will soon be released for Android as well.  I can’t wait to get hold of it.  Pocket Earth integrates GPS navigation with a travel guide database, similar to Wikitravel.  The genius part is, it is all offline.  You can check out the geography of your destination, and read about the local attractions, all without any need for internet connection.   I’ll be writing on the blog about the Android release of Pocket Earth soon.

I have tried out dozens of different navigation, flight booking and guidebook type apps.  A lot of them are good, but some stand head and shoulders above the rest.  Take a look at my must-have app list for some more really useful stuff to put on your device.

Olly:
Nice.  There’s someone here in Edinburgh with an HTC, and he has a slim battery pack which is like a phone shell, that the phone slots into – pretty cool!  Makes it last a lot longer.

Emmanuel:
Right.  You can get solar charging units too, but spare batteries and solar units both add weight to your bag.  Best thing is to get a $2 dashboard plug charger from Ebay.  they weigh virtually nothing, and you can use it to charge up your device in people’s cars as you hitchhike.

Hope that is helpful Olly! I’ll let you know in a while how my new Doogee phone worked out.

Please share Raw Safari with your amigos, and help me build this online gypsy community.
Happy trails, mate!

  
What do you know? If you have more info to add to this Q and A, please share your thoughts in the comments, below.

 
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