Being half chinese, I have quite a lot of family in China and I often go to visit them for really long periods of time. For those of you that don't know, China has a really strict firewall in place restricting access to pretty much any website worth visiting, be it Facebook, Twitter, Blogger, Youtube, Google etc. So for blogger cum social media addict such as myself, you can imagine that it's pretty darn painful being stuck on the other side of the world with almost no means of communicating with the outside world for 2 months a year. In addition, my access to Spotify, Netflix and BBC iPlayer is cut off which means that there really isn't anything for me to do to distract myself. That's where Tunnelbear comes in.


What is Tunnelbear? 
Tunnelbear is the perfect app for browsing the internet when you're abroad. It is a VPN that gives you access to country-specific apps such as Pandora, Netflix, Spotify, Hulu, BBC iPlayer etc. Any app/website/activity that is country specific can be bypassed by installing VPN to your device. You can even vote for contestants on reality TV shows in your home country and unblock sports feeds for Soccer, NHL, MLB and NFL.

Who can use Tunnelbear?
Tunnelbear is currently available on a wide variety of devices including PC, Mac, iPhone, iPad and Android. It changes your location so that you can keep up the pretence that you are still in one of these eight countries: United States, United Kingdom, Australia, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, the Netherlands. Tunnelbear is currently being used in 154 countries.

How does it work? 
It couldn't be simpler to install and start using Tunnelbear. Simply download the app to your device from the Tunnelbear website and follow their step by step instructions.


Why is Tunnelbear better?
I've tried numerous VPN apps before but none of them have been quite as good as Tunnelbear. It's much better than those which give you a browser from which you can go on blocked sites, as those apps won't give you access to country-specific apps such as Netflix. What's more, Tunnelbear makes internet browsing safer as your connection is diverted through secure channels to conceal your location. According to Forbes: “One of the best ways to claw back your privacy on the internet, is to use an app like TunnelBear.”

How much does it cost? 
Little Tunnelbear: 500MB of free data a month, or 1GB if you participate in their Twitter promotion (definitely worth it).
Giant Tunnelbear: $9.99 per month for unlimited data (SALE: $4.99)
Grizzly Tunnelbear: $60 per year for unlimited data (SALE: $49.99)

Final thoughts...
All in all, Tunnelbear is probably the best VPN service out there at the moment. 500GB of data is enough to give you a decent trial and is a great for those going on short trips. If you're going on a slightly longer trip then perhaps investing in the Giant Tunnelbear package would be worth it. $10 really isn't a lot to ensure that you've still got access to your favourite apps. If you'd pay your movie phone company an extra $10 a month for free text messaging when you go abroad, then why would you not invest in Tunnelbear?

*This is a sponsored post. All reviews are 100% my own. 

So you love texting and you love snapchat? Then Frankly Chat is the perfect app for you as it seems combines two of the most popular activities on any smartphone. With Frankly Chat you can send messages and photos to your friends which initially come up 'blurry'. When your friend has received the message and wants to open it they tap the message and the message or picture comes into focus and the timer starts running. As soon as the timer bar has reached the the other end of the screen, the message disappears forever. That is, unless if you screenshot the message, though the sender of the screenshotted message will be alerted to the fact that you have done so, so there's no point trying to be sneaky! Possibly the best feature of Frankly Chat is that you can unsend messages. Everyone, literally everyone, has either sent the wrong message to the wrong person or simply wished that they could take something back but very few apps allow you to do this. For me this is what attracted me to Frankly Chat because you can send messages really quickly and really easily, but if you've been a bit too hasty, you can always take it back later (provided the person you've sent it to hasn't already read it, of course).

There are tonnes of instant messaging apps out there but none of them are quite like Frankly Chat. You can change the background colour of your messages with a swipe and the font size with a pinch. Frankly chat allows you to share your emotions with more than just words with all these customisable features. Another interesting feature, which could probably be just as much of a blessing as a curse, is the opportunity to have anonymous conversations. You can have group conversations with your friends and no one has to know who's saying what. If you want to let your crush know that somebody's (i.e. you) got their eye on them, here's a sly way to do it ;)

Here's the progression of me tacking a screenshot:

 


Just look at how colourful and the conversation is - so much better than plain old texting!

All in all, Frankly Chat offers a wide variety of new features that are unavailable from any other messaging app so get yourself (and your friends) on the hype now!

Find out more about Frankly Chat here!

So recently I discovered this new iPhone app, GottaFlo, which I think is set to become one of the biggest photo sharing apps available from the app store. You might be thinking that you've tried apps that are similar to this before but, trust me, GottaFlo is going to be different. Never has it been easier to find the content that you're looking for and find likeminded people. On GottaFlo's explore page, the most popular tags have already been laid out for you and you're just one touch away from all your favourite content. From #food to #fashion to #beauty to #ask to #selfie to #diy, it's got all your favourite searches ready at your fingertips. My favourite tab is probably the 'Latest' tab, because you can discover the randomest things that you probably would not have found otherwise.

The Official Blogger App.

I'm sure many of you keen bloggers were, like me, desperate to find a way of blogging on the move. Now of course you can send your post by email, but you couldn't really view your post afterwards to see what it looked like. I spent many an afternoon searching for blogging apps on my iPod touch, and though there are some free ones out there, none of them do exacty what I wanted them to do. However, finally, there's an official Blogger app!

It's a very simple app to use and it's so easy to get your work published. Conveniently, the back button is the save button so there's no need to worry about losing your work. If you have multiple blogs, then it is very simple to switch from blog to blog with the tap of your finger and you can just keep on posting. The 'homepage' is simply a list of all your posts, published and drafted, along with three buttons on the bottom, one for writing a new post, one for viewing the mobile version of your blog, and settings. The only useful things you will find in 'settings', is the option to switch blogs and the 'image settings', where you can choose the default size for the pictures you attach.

Whilst the simplicity of the app, makes posting very easy and convenient, it is, perhaps, a little too simple. There aren't as many functions as I would like as it literally a 'posting' app, not a 'Blogger' app. In addition, there is no way to easily format your post. You cannot edit the look of the text (i.e. font, size, colour etc.) at all and when you add a photo to the post you cannot position it where you want to. You can; however, use html, so technically you can format your post, but the amount of effort this requires is immense! It also means that you have to know all the html codes for editing which not all bloggers are aware of. You cannot look at recent posts from blogs you follow and you cannot change the appearance of your blog - when I said this is literally just for posting, I meant it!

When on the posting page itself, there's a row for your post title and the rest of the page is blank space for you to write in with a small strip at the bottom for your post labels. This page has only your basic buttons including: save/back, publish, add a photo, take a photo and add location. If you're writing masses and masses, it's really easy to scroll through everything you've written to check over your work.

I highly recommend this app for any keen blogger with an iPhone, iPod touch or iPad so that you can blog on the move. This app will be most useful to those who simply post plain text/photos, as there isn't really any way of making your post more snazzy. Although it is not possible to carry out all the functions that the Blogger website has, this official app is still better than any of the alternatives out there.

Here's a random screenshot I took of the Blogger App homepage