With an iPhone as a travel companion, navigating strange places can be a breeze. Just open up the maps application of your choice and, through the magic of GPS and GLONASS, you instantly know where you are. Detailed directions to your destination are only a few taps away—if you have a data plan, that is. But sometimes there's just no coverage. And when traveling abroad, cellular data can be really expensive.

Fortunately, by installing the right apps and preparing ahead of time, the iPhone can still be very functional on the road, even without a data connection.

(But first, a tip: if you are traveling abroad and you have an unlocked GSM-compatible iPhone, you can often get a temporary SIM card with a local phone number and a data plan that doesn't break the bank. Try searching the Web for "tourist SIM" along with the country or city name.)

“No data” doesn't mean “no Wi-Fi”

Losing your always-on cellular data connection is one thing, but being completely disconnected from the world Internet for days at a time is much worse. As such, you'll probably want to be able to find Wi-Fi hotspots. Free Wi-Fi is widely available these days, but you'd be surprised how hard it can be to find it when you really need it. I wish I could recommend a good Wi-Fi finder app, but unfortunately, I haven't found any that both have a large enough database of hotspots and a usable offline mode. Wi-Fi Finder and WiFi-Map come the closest. The former has a good database but won't show it to you on the map in offline mode, and the latter shows you cached Wi-Fi networks around you but without a map underneath. There are also numerous city, country, or paid hotspot network-specific Wi-Fi finder apps that can be useful.

In airports and some hotels, you may be limited to paid hotspots only. In hotels you sometimes get 24 hours when you buy a day pass. What I tend to do in those cases—mostly out of spite—is wait an hour before I activate it. That way, when I get back to the hotel at the same time the next day, I still have an hour of Wi-Fi use without buying another pass. In general, paid hotspot networks have unattractive fee structures if you only use them a few times a year. A good solution to this can be Skype Wi-Fi, which lets you use your Skype credit to access Wi-Fi networks. The rates can be a bit steep at $0.05-0.25 a minute, but if you only need a few minutes, it's a good deal. On iOS, Skype Wi-Fi has its own app, separate from the regular Skype app.

Maps at your service

The most critical smartphone application when traveling is the maps app. Fortunately, iPhone users have many to choose from these days. They all cache map data to some degree, and the vector-based maps degrade more gracefully than bitmap-based map tiles. For casual use, you can simply have a look at your destination in Apple's or Google's maps application, and you'll probably be fine. You can even load directions ahead of time—but you can't get them back once they're gone. Don't forget to add important places as bookmarks in Maps or add them to your contacts.

If you're going to cover more ground and/or getting lost is not an option, it's a good idea to use an app that has offline mapping capabilities. For example, the NAVIGON and TomTom apps provide turn-by-turn directions without an active data connection. There are many more choices if you just want offline maps and don't need turn-by-turn driving directions. Search the app store for "offline map" or a city guide for your destination city.

I'm a long-time user of MotionX GPS. It can show "MotionX Road" (OpenStreetMap), "MotionX Terrain" (OpenCycleMap), NOAA marine maps, and different types of Bing and Apple maps, but it can only download for offline use the OpenStreetMap, OpenCycleMap, and NOAA data. You can select the zoom level when downloading maps to get the right trade-off between download size and map detail.

The iPhone normally uses assisted GPS, which means that it loads some data over the Internet to make location fixes happen faster. But the GPS also works unassisted—you don't need a data connection as long as the iPhone isn't in airplane mode. That said, after a long flight, it can take a long time (minutes) for the first GPS fix to happen. Connecting to a Wi-Fi network and then opening an app that uses location services solves this, making subsequent location fixes much faster. If that's not an option, just leave an app that uses GPS open and eventually you'll get a lock. Although the iPhone can sometimes get GPS locks inside, you really want to be outside, preferably with a clear view of the sky, to obtain that first lock.

Navigating your surroundings

Apart from downloading maps for offline use, I also use MotionX GPS to find my way in strange cities. I do this by creating "waypoints" for important locations, such as the place where I'm staying and the sights I want to see. The waypoints are of course overlaid on the downloaded map, but MotionX GPS also lets you navigate toward waypoints by showing an arrow pointing in the right direction using a compass view, along with the distance and expected travel time at the current speed. This is much cruder than turn-by-turn directions, but it still reduces aimless wandering around a strange city. You can also quickly add a waypoint for your current location so you can find your way back later.

I once went on a trip with a few others, and we created a Google Map with all the places we wanted to see on it. You can export the list of marked locations in KML format and then convert them to GPX and import as waypoints in MotionX GPS—which is much easier than adding a long list of waypoints directly on the iPhone.

I always scour the Web for public transit maps before I visit a city. I prefer a PDF version, which you can sync to the iBooks app through iTunes or transfer to iBooks from Safari—the button for this shows up after tapping the displayed PDF. Sometimes the transit authority has an app in the app store, which typically has maps that are better optimized for the iPhone's screen size. There are also many city guides with good transit maps.

An invaluable resource for planning a trip is WikiTravel, available in app form as iTravelFree, which lets you download city guides for offline reference.

Content is king

The boring parts of traveling are a great time to catch up on TED talks, which are conveniently available in a variety of lengths. Although the the TED app can download talks for offline viewing (with subtitles in 90 languages!), I download and sync the talks through the iTunes feed. When on cycling trips I listen to more podcasts than ever, which creates a strange relationship in my brain between the podcast's subject matter and the place where I listened to it—from then on, one will always remind me of the other. I always save up a few episodes of Betty in the Sky with a Suitcase! to get in the mood before I fly.

Under iOS 6 you can save webpages for later reading in Safari so you never have to be without something to read. Or load up on books that are out of copyright through Project Gutenberg. Download the ePub version for reading in the iBooks app. I also like to catch up on my Google Reader RSS feeds with Byline.

A year ago, my passport was stolen when driving from Madrid to Barcelona over Christmas. It turns out that it's really helpful to be able to show a copy of that stolen passport to get all the paperwork in order. Who knew? So I now carry scans of every document and card that I may conceivably need to consult during my travels. I store those—as well as a list of passwords to my frequent flier accounts, Skype, and so on—in the Air Sharing app. It's a bit more expensive than I'd like, but crucially, Air Sharing can be locked with a password. Speaking of scanning: rather than bringing that flat-bed scanner, you may want to get Genius Scan in case you need to scan on the go. Genius Scan creates pretty decent scans using the iPhone's built-in camera.

If you want to test your iPhone in "no data plan" mode, you can turn off cellular data in Settings, General, Cellular.

What else?

These are just our basic (but useful) tips for getting around the globe without having to rely on cellular data, but we're sure you have extra tips to add. Let us know how you manage your travels on your iPhone in the comments.