A heads up on things to do before you get started
Look before you leap. It may sound adventurous to jet off to a new place thinking your smartphone will be there for you, but getting connected in a foreign land is not always a simple process. Google greeted us at the airport with shiny new smartphones, complete with data-enabled 3G cards already installed. No one has ever met me at the airport with anything before, let alone a 3G card, and I doubt it will happen again. Unless things are different for you, please consider the following:
Roaming
Some phone companies offer roaming plans, but check before you fly. Etisalat offers a plan of 25 megabytes for Dh29, but at that rate, using a suite of data-intensive apps would easily run into the hundreds is not thousands of dirhams. Usually, a local sim card with a data plan is much cheaper.
That means having to find a local telco store. You don’t want to be discussing data plans with someone who doesn’t speak your language, so some pre-planning is definitely in order. Before you go, try to figure out where the store is, what type of data plan you’ll need, and make sure the store has the right size sim card (normal, mini and micro) for your phone.
Underground
And remember, 3G service can be spotty, especially if you’re travelling on an underground train from the airport to your hotel. Despite having our 3G cards in Madrid, we couldn’t use them until we got out of the train station and into the open. So you’ll probably need to plan on getting by a little way without your internet connection from time to time.
One last thing to remember, Wi-Fi is not universal so don’t think you’ll be able to skate by on the “generosity” of someone with an unsecured connection. While some cities are very good about making a data connection universal, in Madrid there was none of that. Without a 3G card, the only connections we could find were hotels, which charged a premium, and at a couple of cafés, which offered free Wi-Fi only from a limited time.