We simply couldn’t get a Turkish SIM card to work on my Nexus. While trying to make it across Istanbul during a storm, we had to ask our taxi driver to use his phone to get directions. It would have been nice to just use Google Maps on my own Android phone.

An unpleasant phone call with AT&T yesterday highlighted for me what I consider to be the biggest unsolved problem in mobility: using a smartphone in a foreign country.

Phone calls are expensive. Mobile broadband is either expensive, hard to find or both. And even WiFi can suck.

According to the UN’s World Health Organization, the human race takes more than 900 million trips to countries other than their own each year. It’s a huge problem affecting a very large number of people.

I’m a digital nomad and I live abroad. In the past nine months, I’ve lived in Greece, Turkey, Kenya and Spain. Believe me: Getting connected abroad is harder, more expensive and less satisfying than it should be. 

In case you’ve missed it, there are currently two cases being heard by US District Judge Lucy Koh in the Apple v Samsung patent legal struggle. The first one, Apple won a $1.05 billion verdict last fall against Samsung, which Judge Koh pulled about $450 million off of, and then ordered a new damages trial. She also rejected Apple’s request for a permanent sales ban. Apple appealed, but we’re waiting for a ruling till September, most likely.

There’s been a lot of noise lately surrounding smartphone unlocking. On October 28, 2012, the Library of Congress said it was going to be illegal to unlock your smartphone starting on January 26, 2013.

Since then, Obama has stepped in and said that’s totally not fair. And then a few legislators have brought up bills to make sure people can unlock their smartphones without facing criminal charges. Now AT&T says it wants to be perfectly clear that they don’t really want you to go to jail for unlocking your smartphone.

While the Google Glass may look slightly ridiculous hanging off your face, it’s hard to deny it has some pretty nifty uses. The ability to navigate your way around a new city with directions in the corner of your eye, or record things like concerts and sporting events from your own perspective is pretty cool.

And there’s another feature that could prove incredibly useful. According to New Scientist, Google Glass has the ability to find your friends in a crowded place, such as a shopping mall or a busy bar, based on the clothes they wear.

But there’s a catch.

Rovio has taken some time away from Angry Birds and Bad Piggies to focus on its next project, the official game for the upcoming DreamWorks movie The Croods. Believe it or not, it’s not a physics-based puzzle game, and Rovio has released the game’s first trailer to prove it.