AwayPhone: One soluton to mobile roaming costs..

AwayPhone has what seems like a good solution if you are going to travel to a bunch of different countries. It only works for home phones from the USA, UK/Ireland and Canada at the moment, but from there you can roam pretty much anywhere, including Australia and NZ.

The Register has a good review. It is not perfect, but better it seems than using multiple phones. As I currently have, err, several* phones, I certainly understand the attraction.

Basically you make a call, which gets dropped, and then you get called back by a voip service.  The voip service connects through to the other caller. You have a local number in the away country, so local callers do not have to dial your home country, but can still be called on your home number.

It also works with SMS, but not, alas, data.  So, until this arrives here in better form, with data and local access, I’ll stick to my multiple phone strategy:

*Right now I have:

a NZ phone (Nokia 9500 communicator)

an Australian phone (an indestructible Nokia that gets vibrated harshly on my Austrian motorbike)

a US phone (cheap pre-pay locked Nokia, purchased from Wal*Mart for about $50. This is the cheapest way to make calls in the US)

a South African phone. Another cheapo Nokia. Somewhere.

and the new Nokia E90 Communicator,  which is being delivered to me this week sometime. It does pretty much everything, ad will replace the 9500, which is pretty much destroyed by now.

And yes, I trust there will be an iPhone in my future, once the dust settles from the unlocking adventures, and once it is high speed (ie. European).

I’m pretty convinced that a two phone strategy is best – e.g. a local phone (Australia right now) and a home phone. That let’s the locals call you without paying over the odds, and of course makes it cheaper to call them. When I travel through several countries on a trip then I try to get sim cards (or locked phones) for each one. I’d really love a phone with multi-sim card capability.

I also like the strategy of a bunch of people that I hung with in the Philippines 2 years back – one work phone (often the 9500/E90) and one personal phone (something fun). You can turn the work phone off in the evenings.