Travel Happy

When you’re travelling, being able to read both text messages and your email on your phone is a major timesaver. Google have made it even easier to read your Gmail account on your mobile phone

I’ve been making increasingly frequent use of Google’s Gmail application which installs Gmail browser right on your phone. This lets me access my Gmail account with a couple of clicks, and read and respond to messages. I mainly use it for when I’m away from my computer all day, so I can check if anything important has come in – and I wish I’d had something like this when I was travelling around Thailand, so I could quickly check email and then go to an Internet cafe if I needed to write a proper response to anything.

If you’re interested in being able to do the same, first you’ll need a Gmail account. It won’t work with other web-based email Services like Hotmail and Yahoo. To get the Gmail application, download it from the link above. If you want to use it in Thailand, you will need to make sure that you have a Thai SIM card for your phone and that you have asked the staff in the shop to enable the WAP or mobile Internet functionality. It sounds complicated but it will take them a couple of minutes to do this for you. I can specifically recommend Telewiz on the 3rd Floor of Emporium Department Store at Phrom Phong BTS station as being able to do this for you if you run into language problems in other stores.

They fixed up my Sony Ericsson 750i and it’s worked fine ever since. If you are spending several weeks in Thailand, you might want to do the same so you have the convenience of checking your Gmail account wherever you are in the country (provided you have cellphone coverage, obviously). Remember that browsing data on a mobile phone is cheap in Thailand but can still chew up your credit, and that it’s unlikely to work if you use your Thai SIM Card to go roaming in other South East Asian countries like Vietnam (although I haven’t put it to the test myself yet).