I am in China for a few days. I brought along a borrowed Nexus One because I wanted to make sure it would work here before I bought one. I am pleased to say that it worked fine. I popped in my China Mobile SIM Card, turned it on, logged in to my Google account, and off I went. Obviously the native Facebook app doesn't work because Facebook is still blocked, and the Twitter app I am using right now, Seismic, didn't work either, since Twitter is blocked as well. GPS and Google Maps worked very nicely, with detailed road maps and well-labeled satellite imagery. I haven't tried out the navigation, however. I did turn out Google Latitude and my family back in the states had no trouble following my movements.
Overall, no problems to report. If you are coming to China and have a Nexus One, by all means bring it. Just make sure that if you do buy a prepaid SIM card for service from China Mobile or another provider, make sure it is one of the plans like M-Zone that includes data services. Some of the more basic, no-frills plans do not include data services, even as an add-on. If you do sign up for M-Zone or another plan, you should probably also sign up for a data plan. M-Zone has data plans where you can sign up for different monthly quotas, like 20Mb/month or 50Mb/month, and they deduct some fairly small charge every month from your balance. If you don't sign up for a data plan, you'll pay according to your traffic, which could drain you balance quickly.
One other nice thing about China mobile: at least in Beijing, they have fabulous English-language customer service via their help line, 10086. Every time I have needed to reach them to go over something, I had someone on the line in seconds, and they were able to resolve my problem quickly.
One other thing: 3G service in Beijing seems spotty. In some ways this may not be a bad thing. Yesterday I was somewhere that had 3G service and the battery drained very quickly. I'm not sure why, but someone else at the meeting who had a Nexus One said their battery also drained very quickly that day. I went into the settings to force 2G service, hopefully this will give me some battery life.
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4 comments:
How were you able to use Nexus One's 3G w/ China Mobile's TD-WCDMA 3G? I can't seem to get it to work, any specially settings to tweak?
By TD-WCDMA, do you mean their usual GSM service? I didn't do anything special. I just popped my SIM card in and was good to go. I didn't have to tweak any of the settings. Note that I was signed up with M-Zone service that included a monthly data allowance. I think you need to be signed up with one of their prepaid or contract services that includes data. If you have Shenzhouxing, all you can get is voice.
It is impossible for you to use China Mobile's 3g service with Nexus One. China Mobile's 3G service uses TD-SCDMA network, which is not compatible with Nexus One.
All I do know is that I was using China Mobile M-Zone service in Beijing with my Nexus One, and everything seemed to work fine, except of course for apps like Facebook and Twitter. I didn't check to see whether it was 3G service. You're probably right that it probably wasn't the 3G service, but whatever it was, was sufficient for my needs. I was able to use Google Maps, email, and most other apps with no problem.
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