One of the things that I've wanted for a long time is to keep the gps coordinates of the pictures that I've taken. They are starting to roll it out into some point and shoot cameras, but we just got a new-ish one. They have fancy attachments for a DSLR (that don't work with my camera) and seem to be bulky, clumsy, and kill the battery life. I was happy being able to use my iphone to take pictures because it's got a built in gps, but the gps radio does not work when the phone is in "airplane" mode. I would always put the phone in airplane mode when traveling to not incur crazy roaming fees. I discovered this by looking at the picture of Bangkok and seeing that they were tagged as Vancouver airport which was the last place the phone was connected to a phone network. :-/
I was asking at our phone providers about roaming charges and a guy from my company just told me to buy a new phone when we get there. That sucks. If the phone wasn't locked I could just swap out the SIM card and be fine.
Then I had a breakthrough: I can just take the SIM card out. The phone won't connect to the network, but the radios will still work. Without a cell tower, the gps lock will be longer, if at all (no line of sight in tall buildings). But it should work and I don't have to worry about coming home to a multi-thousand dollar bill.
The other issue of walking around without an always-on 'net connection is that I won't have access to google maps. Yes, I'm spoiled. I think that I've found a solution to that as well with the MotionX GPS app and it's ability to download maps before you go "offline". I've only played with it a little bit so I'll have to report how it goes later.
I love traveling.
