Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

Executive summary: on a recent multi-country European trip, a co-traveler constantly drooled over my G3, which I was using to connect multiple devices while she was paying Verizon $10 per day for not-always-reliable roaming cellular access on one phone. Details: This just works. You link your G3 to a GlocalMe account, deposit money and use it to buy a data package valid for the country you're traveling to. Then you just boot up the device. It finds and connects to a local cell network and creates a password-protected WiFi hot spot you can log into with your phone, tablet, laptop, etc. You're good to go. The G3 is my second GlocalMe; I bought it via an upgrade offer to replace a G1S, and this model fixes every significant issue with the first-generation version. In particular, the battery no longer overheats and its life has doubled, the interface is totally redone to be user-friendly, and it only sips your data package (more on that below). The G3 connects to 4G networks where they exist, and GlocalMe has come out with a wide variety of single-country and regional data packages that can cut airtime costs by 50% or more over the worldwide package. To me, owning a GlocalMe is now a no-brainer for anyone who wants to stay connected at a reasonable cost during foreign travel. I've used the G3 in three European countries, with no major problems. The first time you boot it up in a country, it takes a couple of minutes to connect to the local network; subsequent boots in that country take under a minute. It's important to realize that the G3 depends on connecting to a local cellular network in every country, so it only gives 4G speeds where GlocalMe's in-country partner network supports them. Data usage: Some of the reviews mentioning data usage can be misleading, because you don't know how the reviewers are using their data. We kept two phones constantly connected while we were awake, occasionally added a tablet, and 1 GB of data lasted about a week. But to save data (and money), we tweaked the phone and tablet settings not to do automatic app updates or constant email syncing, and kept our background apps and automatic notifications to the minimum necessary. Streaming burns lots of data; we didn't do any. And Google Maps is also a data hog, so I closed it whenever it wasn't in active use. By way of contrast, a friend whose phone wasn't tweaked connected to our G3 and ran through 500MB of data in less than a day. How much data you use is pretty much up to you. A couple of minor glitches, but none worth dinging a star: (1) Twice during our trip, the screen interface defaulted to the (apparently native) Chinese language for no discernible reason. By following the icons (More / Language) I restored it to English. (2) The G3 lost connection to the local cellular networks a couple of times, but just notified with a message box on its screen. I only noticed the lost connection when I tried and failed to be able to use a connected device, which was still showing a wi-fi connection. Both times, a G3 reboot quickly reconnected to the cell network. Finally, two improvements that are still needed: (1) You should be able to select which data package to use. Currently, you must burn through data packages in the order you buy them, which can waste a lot of money. If you have a worldwide 1GB data package (Cost: 30 Euros) and go to Germany for a week, you can't buy and use a single-country German package (Cost: 7 Euros) until you've used up the worldwide package. That doesn't make sense. (2) The G3 should notify you (preferably via its phone app) when a data package runs low, so you can buy a new one without having to regularly check its screen for the amount of remaining data. The previous model got four stars; it worked, but had several problems and idiosyncrasies. This one just works, and works well.