A thoroughly successful day…

As I was planning for my new job, with its regular travel to China, I realized that I wouldn’t be able to rely upon my AT&T iPhone. Yes, it would be OK (but expensive) for calls to and from the US, but I couldn’t really use it for local calls and text messaging within China, and I certainly couldn’t afford to turn on data roaming. So while I was at SFO awaiting my flight to Hong Kong, I bought myself an unlocked GSM phone, intending to put a pay-as-you-go SIM into it when I reached China.
The phone I bought was a Palm Centro. Cute as a button, nice keyboard, and Palm OS, which is a bit primitive but still oodles better than Windows Mobile. I arrived in Shenzhen, plugged a China Mobile SIM into it, bought a prepaid card from a street vendor, topped up the balance to just over 100 RMB, and I was ready to go. And during the first week, I used it a lot: checking email, text messaging ((Tons of texting – I never really used it back home, but here everyone texts all the time.)) There was just one problem. The phone didn’t handle Chinese characters. Any Chinese character – in email, SMS, SIM management, caller ID, etc. – simply displayed as a “?”.
Now you might think that this wasn’t very important. After all, I don’t speak or read Chinese. But there are lots of cases where the ability to receive (or even send) Chinese email and text messages is really useful. For example: this afternoon, Jim and I were in downtown Shenzhen, shopping for electronics. (More of that anon.) By 6:30, we were wrapping up and thinking about dinner. Jim texted a colleague of his, and asked him to recommend a really good restaurant. Back came the reply, with the restaurant name in Chinese. As we navigated the maze of streets towards the restaurant, Jim was able to get directions by showing the SMS message on his phone to several people who then pointed us in the right direction. We’ve used the same trick with taxi drivers.
All of this explains why we found ourselves shopping this afternoon. Jim was looking for some networking gear, and I was hoping to find a reasonable unlocked phone that “spoke” Chinese. Jim had trodden this path before, and after a wild taxi ride we found ourselves in a street full of vast electronics bazaars: department store sized buildings full of stalls and shops where people were selling everything from resistors and ribbon cables to graphics cards to cellphones to cameras to laptops… and everything in between. It was a geek’s heaven. Jim found what he wanted, and I was browsing and on the point of giving up when I spotted a G1 Android. Was it unlocked? Of course: the stall-holder invited me to remove the SIM from my despised Centro and put it in the G1, whereupon Jim called me and sent me a text message. I went down to the ATM on the ground floor, got some cash, and returned to close the deal.
Flushed with success, Jim and I went out to dinner at a restaurant which is one of the best we’ve ever eaten at; I would give you the name, except that I can’t read their business card! (But it’s a chain, and they have a cool web site, and the phone number of the one we went to is 26492008. Does that help?)
Back at the hotel, I checked out my new toy. There was only one flaw: the charger was actually for a different phone, with the wrong kind of mini-USB connector. ((Why are there so many different types of connector for a “standard” interface like USB???)) Fortunately the regular USB cable was correct, and I found that I could use my iPhone’s charger with the G1. Everything else is just fine, and the Android itself works like a dream. 3G data access is lightning fast, and Google Maps works fine here in Shenzhen.
Who knows? Perhaps I’ll wind up getting a prepaid SIM in the USA, just to show off the new toy. Although from what I hear, none of the carriers offering prepaid service in the USA support decent data plans