What’s better? Using your own phone with your wireless plan from at home and paying for roaming or to buy a local sim card at arrival?

It depends what you want to do.

If you just want to call home, buying a local sim card can sometimes be cheaper. It depends on the carrier and plan you choose. Maybe your carrier at home offers international calling addons, which is also sometimes cheaper.

If you want mobile broadband for your netbook or smartphone on the go, then local prepaid sim cards are often cheaper.

An example:

Our carrier at home charges $10 / MB when roaming in Australia. Let’s say we need 50 MB of data to check emails, turn-by-turn navigation and a little bit Facebook. That would be $500.

Mobile broadband in Australia – What did we do?

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For us, flying across the world is just a common thing. We love flying, it doesn’t matter whether we choose business class or economy.

Some people may fly for the first time or just can’t relax with the engine noise next to them.
What can you do?  For instance flashpackers should think of buying a pair of headphones with active noise-cancelation.

Therefore we bought the Sennheiser PXC 450. We chose this product, because we saw it first when we entered one of the electronic stores at San Francisco International Airport.

The PXC 450 are definitely high-end headphones. They’re heavy, robust and stylish. The headphones come with a robust case, 2 batteries, a 5,25mm adapter and an airplane adapter for onboard use.

The active noise-cancelation feature needs power to work, supplied by an AAA battery. Sennheiser already included 2 of them, which is really nice.

We used the Sennheiser onboard a flight between California and Europe (about 11 hrs flight time) for about 6 hours (the other 5 hours we were sleeping and eating ). During this time the headphones really felt comfortable on the ears. We’re not audiophiles, but we think the audio quality is very decent. What else can you expect from 400 bucks headphones? The included airplane adapter comes in very handy, if you forgot your standard adapter at home. Our flight was performed on an A340-600 and the plug fit perfectly.

The noise cancelation works very well. Big parts of the engine noise were removed, but not completely. We were also able to hear the passenger sitting next to us, when he was talking to the flight attendants.
The flight was definitely more relaxed than without headphones.

The battery should last for a long distance flight. If you run out of battery, you can switch to the pass-throu mode, which means you can use them as normal headphones. There are also 2 buttons to control the volume in the right hand earcup.

The price tag was about 400 bucks when we bought them at SFO airport.

Verdict
We like the PXC 450, they’re robost and have decent audio quality. They’re very comfortable, a bit heavy though. Aircraft adapter, transport case and the included batteries makes it a nice package. We think they’re worth the price.

We will review different headphones as soon as one of our travel companions needs a new pair.