At home, you can pretty much trust your own Wi-Fi network, and you kind of have to trust your cellular provider. But as soon as you fetch up at a hotel, airport, Airbnb rental or coffee shop, you risk everything.
Short of leaving your MacBook or iPhone out on the table while you visit the bathroom at a hacker conference, using public Wi-Fi is just about the worst thing you can do with your devices when you travel. Fortunately, there are ways to protect yourself — and they’re cheap and easy.
Welcome to Tech Travel Tips, a week of travel tips for vacationers. This week we’ll show you how to keep your devices safe while traveling, what apps to download before you go, what settings you should change before leaving the house and — kicking off the week — the best travel gadgets to take with you. Let’s get started!
Siri translation seems like the most obvious thing in the world. You probably already asked him/her the meaning of a foreign word, or how to say an English phrase in another language. Under iOS 11, though, this will actually work.
All you have to do is to ask Siri how to say something, and s/he will respond with an answer. Even better, you can use Type to Siri to make the query, which may come in handy when you’re in a line at the market and you don’t want to start talking into your iPhone.
Traveling? You need a currency conversion app then, right? No! If you’re carrying your iPhone, you can do those conversions quickly, using Spotlight, without even unlocking your iPhone. Better still, you can do those currency conversions while offline, which might be essential when you’re roaming in a foreign land.
1Password, the ultimate password management app for iOS, now makes your data even more secure when you travel.
Its new Travel Mode removes every vault from your devices except for those marked “safe for travel.” If you’re asked to unlock your smartphone or tablet at the border, only the passwords you really need will be exposed.
The iOS Photos app might just look like a simple grid-like list, but it has a ton of hidden power. For instance, you can see your photos on a full-screen, 3-D Flyover map. And with one simple swipe on a photograph, you can see where it was taken, see other photos taken nearby, and collections photos that your iPhone figures are related to the one you’re looking at. It’s a fantastic way both to find out more about your pictures, and to browse. After all, why limit yourself to flipping through pictures, one by one, in the order you shot them, like some film-camera using hipster luddite, when you can see your photos on a map in Apple’s glorious 3-D Flyover view?
Another week, another round of great new deals at the Cult of Mac Store. This go-round, we’ve got a voltage converter that’ll keep you charged all over the world, a powerful mind-mapping tool for more productive studying and reading, a bundle of a dozen top-shelf Mac apps, and an extra-long, extra-tough Lightning cable that’ll outlive us all.
And everything’s going for a fraction of the usual price!
Herschel is just about the top name in travel gear today, making bags and luggage that are as tough as they are good-looking. Let’s be honest — they put your suitcases and backpacks to shame. Premium bags like these go for a premium price, that is unless you enter this massive giveaway. This Herschel travel bundle includes five items that would normally cost a pretty penny, from suitcases to duffels and backpacks and more, but if you can enter today for a chance to get the whole shebang for free.
The various parts in your iPhone have traveled a great distance to reach your pocket — combined, they’ve gone almost as far as to the moon and back.
That fancy Touch ID button on the front of your iPhone 6s, for example, inhabits a 12,000-mile footprint alone, what with the artificial sapphire crystal (originating in Changsha, China) that’s bonded to a metal ring (transported 550 miles from Jiangsu province) and then shipped to a semiconductor plant in Kaohsiung, Taiwan (another 1,000 miles).
The miles continue to rack up via parts sourced in Europe and shipped to Japan, then finally brought back to Foxconn in China. And that’s just a single, small, unsexy part of the iPhone.
It’s not often we hear any major new features coming to Foursquare lately, but the service just announced something pretty huge. It has partnered with Delivery.com to allow users to order food, groceries and even liquor right from the app to get sent straight to their homes.
The developers of the Poison Maps app figured out a new way to implement 3D Touch that goes above and beyond what we’re used to seeing. They use two patent-pending gestures called “context zooming” and “context panning.” The first lets you quickly see the surrounding area of a particular location you’re zoomed in on without leaving that location, while the latter lets you move around in the surroundings and effortlessly focus in on somewhere new.
These gestures work using long presses. Since 3D Touch can sense varying amounts of force, Poison Apps cleverly uses the technology to adjust the zoom based on how hard you press.
A blaring megaphone is an effective way to get people’s attention. But what if the people in the room speak a multitude of languages?
A Tokyo airport is trying to solve the language gap with international travelers with a megaphone that lets the user communicate in three different languages. A worker speaking one of three languages, Chinese, Korean or English, can have their message broadcast in the other two.
Foursquare is now contributing “business listings data” to Apple Maps. Since the launch of Maps, Apple vowed to collect data from multiple sources to improve the service over time, and is living up to that promise with this new addition.
It’s white, cylindrical, has a spinning head and is full of electrical connectors. It’s not Luke Skywalker’s trusty robotic assistant, but the Twist Plus+ World Charging Station could be yours with its ability to charge five devices simultaneously and through outlets anywhere in the world. It’s a game-changer for the international traveler or anyone who travels with more than one mobile device, and right now you can get one for just $34.99.
The tools inside the business traveler’s carry-on luggage have changed. The luggage itself has not.
Two companies are hoping to take off through crowd-funding with modern roller bags that fit all the essentials and charge your devices. One even has a router to give you a Wi-Fi hotspot where ever you land.
It looks like HopStop is doing the walk of shame back from Apple’s apartment. The city transit mapping service is shutting down as of this October. Apple acquired HopStop in 2013 and seems to have used up just about all of the data it wants for its own Maps app, so the folks in Cupertino have apparently moved on.
When Airbnb set out to design an app for the Apple Watch, its team did so like a master woodcarver. Whittle away until you leave what is essential.
The popular community hospitality network launched a watch app today that provides a simple messaging hub for hosts and guests. Travelers can send a host a message with name, photo and requested dates. A host can accept or decline right on the wrist and respond to messages, either through dictation or a preset response.
Disappearing photo and video sharing app, Snapchat, has just updated to include a couple of great new features, including a data-reducing Travel Mode, an emoji button called Sticker Picker, and a way to see who’s viewing your posts, called Stories, in the app itself.
Apple continued its marketing blitz for the Apple Watch today with four new TV ads that highlight how useful the new wearable is for fitness freaks as well as travel junkies.
Two of the clever new ads titled ‘Beijing’ and ‘Berlin’ show two sets of friends using Apple Watch and its many apps to explore the city, talk to locals in a different language, and communicate on the fly. The other two ads feature number fitness and goal setting apps, as well as how the watch brings people closer together.
You can watch all four ads below:
We’ve all been through those wretched travel-charging woes. When traveling abroad, you:
A: Pay overweight baggage fees thanks to your collection of travel adapters, chargers, and cords.
B: Spend the first hour of your trip on the floor by an outlet, trying to figure out which plug goes where.
C: First A, then B.
D: Pack a lightweight charger that charges multiple devices simultaneously almost anywhere in the world.
If you picked D, congratulations—you already own the Twist Plus World Charging Station and you’re probably really smart and good-looking. If you picked A, B, or C, good news—your charging hassles can be over for good for just $34.99 at Cult of Mac Deals.
The worst part about vacationing is coming back home and getting hit in the face with cold, hard reality. Excessive food consumption, relaxing atmospheres and sugary alcoholic beverages are out of your life and work is back in. But what if you take the travel part (not to mention the cost) completely out of equation? You get Flyover in Apple Maps.
Why vacation in this costly, unforgiving world when you can live vicariously through your iPhone, iPad or Mac?
Flyover, the immersive 3-D view in Apple Maps, now supports hundreds of cities around the world and Apple adds more all the time. In fact, seven more were added to the list just today so we thought it would be fun to take a look at the hottest vacationing spots of 2015, without even leaving the couch.
Get your summer vacay on at these hot Flyover spots:
Sometimes it seems like there have been a lot of plane crashes lately. Between Malaysia Airlines Flight 370, Malaysia Airlines Flight 17/a>, and Transasia Airways Flight 235, it sometimes feels like there’s never been a worse time to fly.
Of course, that’s not true at all. There’s statistically almost zero chance at all of you dying in a plane crash, no matter how often you fly. And now there’s an app, specifically dedicated to assuaging your fears of dying in an aircraft.
As the world gets smaller and smaller thanks to the global marketplace called the internet, you may sometimes need to know exactly how much your dollar will get you in the wider world. Is that £15 widget really worth it? You’ll only know if you convert it to some form of currency that you understand better.
Your Mac has at least three ways to do this sort of calculation: with a Dashboard widget, the built-in Calculator app, and even with Spotlight. Here’s how to convert currencies into something that makes more sense, right from your handy Mac computer.
The lengthy list of logistics involved in starting any business eventually lands on what to do about equipment and office space.
James Turner and Holly Kennedy run their user experience design consultancy out of a single backpack each as they trek from country to country like nomadic college students with a free summer.
Kennedy says you won’t find the couple “wearing bandannas or growing dreadlocks” but they are happy living life on their own terms — with an unconventional commute and ever-changing scenery. Cult of Mac caught up with the ex-Londoners, both 26, in northern Thailand, where they were working around spotty Wi-Fi and a client 13 time zones away.
Apple has been steadily working to improve its Apple Maps service since its disastrous debut a couple of years ago, and a new patent application published Thursday further cements that.
According to the application, filed in March last year, future iOS devices may scour through your data to warn you of traffic congestion on routes you are predicted to be likely to travel.
These journeys could be learned by your iPhone or Apple Watch by way of a smart artificial intelligence “machine-learning engine,” based on the frequency of previous destinations (say, regular appointments), location of events in a user’s calendar, location of events which users hold electronic tickets for, and addresses gathered by analyzing messages in the form of texts or emails.
