SMS txt tricks to avoid data roaming while travelling

 Buying a local simcard is now thankfully a reality for a lot of places. But not everywhere and it can sometimes be a pain to do and setup (tip: don't walk out of the shop until the shop assistant has shown it working on your phone).

A lot of people use SMS on the road. While it can be expensive to send, it's reliable. As long as you don't get into back and forth replies with someone it shouldn't be too expensive.

Some ideas:

- setup SMS balance notifications with your bank, since finding a secure connection to logon will be difficult if not impossible in some places and many banks don't offer decent 2-factor authentication like password grids or google authenticator... and also many ATM's don't allow balance checking. Chext might help you if your bank doesn't support balance by SMS. If you can't get this working though then for goodness sake just take note on a piece of paper as you spend! (I'm guilty of not doing this too)

- you can search google by SMS

- update twitter, facebook and google plus status, blogger by SMS

- question services such as ChaCha

- "program" (effectively) using SMS to do things on your behalf using "If this, then that" https://ifttt.com/ . You can use SMS both as an input (costs) or as an output (free)
so...
- txt yourself the weather in the morning and sunrise
- many more ideas here

- obviously if you do have a data connection there's WhatsApp but it's a permissions and battery hog so you might prefer Contacts+ or any other of those services

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