I am just back from a very fruitful trip to Boston, visiting friends, meeting various colleagues and business acquaintances, even giving presentations.

One problem when you are abroad is how to stay connected: I am used to checking email, messages, and do various surfing on my iPhone, or to use it to get an Internet connection via 3G or 4G. If you do that with a Norwegian (or any non-US) SIM card in USA, you will experience a very nasty sticker shock – I have heard of people being charged literally hundreds of dollars per day just because they forgot to turn off “data roaming” on their cell phones.

Anyway – here is a great solution which we stumbled upon when renting a car at Hertz. I ordered the car with GPS, and we were given a little bag which turned out to contain a Samsung Note with TravelTab. The GPS was excellent, clear and crisp and very good at choosing a fast route around traffic.

But the real boon came with we investigated the device a bit further and found that it a) could make telephone calls (standard price per minute for a call from your foreign cell phone is up to $2 per minute) and, best of all, a WiFi spot. Turn it on, and we had flawless WiFi (for up to 5 devices) in the car as we were bouncing down the highway (the car was a GMC Terrain, quite a contrast from the Tesla I have gotten used to.)

The price for the TravelTab was, I think, around $10/day, definitely worth it for the WiFi alone. Highly recommended!