[Verizon Samsung Galaxy S III] _sadpanda:
please read this before heading abroad!!

please update main post. I'm just back from a germany/austria trip and these are my notes:

SG3 stock rom rooted ('original' root method from first few weeks of release.. waiting on a stock JB ROM to be stable before reflash)

T-Mobile is the VZW equivelant in the region I went. dont mess with blau etc. coverage sucks. T-mobile or O2 should be the only two options considered. look out though... T-mobile prepaid klax cards are regional over there (as a do over, I would have a t-mobile klax austria card for austria and a different one for germany)

if you are not 100% fluent in the language you are buying the sim card for, a laptop with chrome pre-installed is a requisite. all of the sims I came across were base sims that needed 're-ups' that are much easier to handle via the native website. all that needs translated.

add the offline SIM app to the requisite apps download list... finding APN info and adding it is a pita with a basic connection. this app at least takes the offline and google searching out of the equation. (and often the translation)

BACK UP YOU IEMI BEFORE LEAVING!!!! DO THE CWM METHOD!!! my phone would not work when i came back to the states until i did the zip restore of my iemi. the "plan A" method did not work for me. had to use plan B

save a copy of the stock (or the aftermarket of your choice) dialer. somehow my dialer got corrupted while changing apn's back and forth and the only fix was to use root explorer to copy/paste from my wife's unmolested phone. btw the stock dialer is under /system/app/ and is called secPhone.apk adn secPhone.apk (that **** took a while to find too)

DONT count on any help from any foreigners even if their English is amaze-balls.... their phones just work (via auto configure via sms btw)... messing with rooting locked phones, apn manager and phone info baffles them.

in order to get foreign text messaging to work after a SIM change, I had to open phone info, update the smsc number, then manually delete everything but the main number and hit update. (typically, when you hit refresh, phone info pulls this:

"xxxxx",xxx

the quotes, comma and number after the comma seemed to be garbage for my applications and deleting them and hitting update fixed the problem)

USING APN MANAGER, BACKUP YOUR APNS BEFORE STARTING!!! umm i'm not sure whether this is actually critical but when you first load APN manager after install, there are a ton of VZW apns in orange and one in green (active). I have no idea what the orange means but there is no way to get those other APNs orange again that I see when you return unless you do a restore.

ADD TALKATONE to your MUST ADD apps before you leave. the common ad blocker worked fine and talkatone was flawless even on ****ty connections. a life saver to say the least. in fact, I will probably buy this app just because of how well it worked.

add a tethering app to the mix so you can run all of your devices from your cell. most hotels have 'free' wifi but they want you to use a web auth protal and NONE of the airports are free. this is also great if you are travelling with others... buy just one sim card, change one phone and load up with data on one account and use tethering to link everything together.

other notes: google's current implementation of offline maps only downloads car navigable data. most euopean cities have large sections of pedestrian only streets and you wont get those street names. as an aside, most of this is useless because gps+tall buildings is futile over there. also note, my tracks and other apps dont appear to recognize the fact that there is an 80mb offline map available to pull info from. I hope google figures out a way to open this up to developers and expand this functionality.

if anyone plans on spending some quality time in munich or another major metropolitan area where blau.de has good coverage this month let me know. I've got a lightly used 3gb data plan I'll hook you up with.