European SIM card
 

Hi fellow travellers,
I'm riding my bike from England to France, Spain, Italy, Croatia, Greece, Bulgaria, Ukraine, Poland, Czech Republic, Austria, Germany, Switzerland, Belgium and Netherlands in the northern summer this year. I want to navigate using Google Maps on a Samsung 3G tablet running Android 4 but I need to have a local SIM Card for it to work. This would also allow me to have portable email and Skype access. Does anyone know if you can get a SIM card that will work across most or all of these countries? If so, Where can I get one and how much? Any other comments on my plan are most welcome because I've never been to Europe (I live in Australia).
Thanks
Rob

Roaming
 

Its called data roaming and it is available from your own home sim supplier. The problem is that when you visit each country your data charges go ballistic so switch it off to save money.
There is NO simple one supplier answer for data roaming you will just have to buy a cheap sim card in each country(which will give a new phone number as well??) use up all your credit on it and throw it away until the next country.
Personnaly I have found sending data over a phone connection to be very slow and costly that it is not worth it. Best to just find a internet cafe or hotel and use their PC to do what you need it will be cheaper and faster. Just keep your normal phone for emergancy calls and use so that your family can get hold of you otherwise they will be lost with all the different country sim cards.
:mchappy:

I've not personally tried it yet, but there are a number of Android apps which allow you to save maps (usually from OpenStreetMaps) for offline use. OSMand springs to mind as one I've seen mentioned a lot by posters on here.

Data rates will be nuts for downloading them as you go.

A quick search throws up:

http://www.gosim.com/index.php?page=...372euro|Europe

and

Buy International Sim Cards | SimCardGlobal

John

Hi, I haven't been posting here for a loong time...

just adding my twopence to this conversation: in Italy there are not pay as you go sims you can buy without having an Italian National Insurance Number (Codice Fiscale) last time I checked.
Yes, you need to register the sim with photocopies ID card, NI number just to buy a simple pay as you go simcard and the activation can take 24 hours.
Positive side is that Italian people tend to stick to their phone numbers even if they are on pay as you go, I was able to reach people on they cells after 15 years...!

Have fun.