[Tilt, TyTN II, MDA Vario III General] izmahoby:
Niche market thread:

I had been using a Cingular 8525 in China for about half a year, then upgraded to an AT&T Tilt 8925 for about four months and am figuring out some persistent problems so want to share. I would have paid well for all of this info a few months ago. Here goes:

Using local service:

You can get a local sim card for about 30RMB here and will cost allot less to use your US sim when you're over here. You will have to do a sim unlock first. I got my code from AT&T in about two days (surprisingly fast), but you can also buy an unlock from Ebay or might be able to find an unlock on here.

Using Chinese on your phone:

Even if you don't speak Chinese being able to receive Chinese text messages may be very helpful. If your hosts can send you text messages you can show them to cab drivers etc. Adding the trial version of CEStar will let you see the Chinese messages, at least for a the trial period. If you don't want to buy/install CEStar, you can change the ROM to a Chinese version.

Using China mobile GPRS:

I have subscribed to the 50MB/month plan for 20 RMB, otherwise is is .1RMB/kb. You can see a schedule of the different plans here.

Edge is available in many Chinese cities and the slower G network works in some pretty remote areas. China Mobile will instruct you to install a wap and a cmnet connection. Wap works for many applications such as Google earth, but doesn't support www browsing. The cmnet setup was troublesome on my newer Tilt, but not on the older 8125. More on that further down.

To setup China Mobile cmnet access do the following:

Make sure your GPRS settings are set to PAP, not CHAP.

Under Settings>Connections>Manage Existing Internet Settings enter:

Name for Connection: China mobile gprs (or whatever you want)

Select a modem: GPRS, 3G

Next

Access Point name: cmnet

Everything else can be blank for the cmnet connection

Wap settings:

Make a new connection just like above,

enter the access point name: cmwap

again, no user name or password required

Advanced> Use specific IP address: 10.0.0.172

I am not sure if there is really a need to have both a wap and cmnet connection. It seems that if you have cmnet you can use the connection for any purpose.

After you changed these settings be sure to restart your device.

As I said my latest phone is an AT&T Tilt. A couple friends here paid allot more for the HTC branded version from HK and didn't experience this problem. My cmnet wouldn't work. The service here in China is only slightly less clueless than AT&T regarding using your phone in China. I had no problem using wap, but cmnet, for browsing the internet and some other programs would not work over the wap connection. I was finally able to fix this by flashing the HTC rom, though you will have to unlock it (not the same as a sim unlock) before you can load this non-AT&T rom.

Using the non AT&T rom the it auto-configured for the China mobile service, so after hours of trying to fix the connection settings and seeing dozens of Chinese websites give me the same connection settings information, just flashing a new ROM is the key.

Other suggestions:

The Chinese/English dictionary Plecodict works quite well on the phone even if you don't have the Chinese localizer (see CEStar). In its current version the only problem is if you cut/paste in and out of the software allot it will hang. I am told they are working on it. Using this programs writing utility with the dictionary is why I am using the Tilt.

Use the Chinese version of Google maps. It is in Chinese, ofcourse, but at the rate of roads changing and being built here last year's software is missing allot of info. Even if your Chinese isn't good you can cut/paste the address into it to easily find the address.

Remaining questions:

I haven't figured out how to use the built in GPS for anything useful outside of North America. The English version of Google earth has the North America road info and works with the GPS. The Chinese version has great street info but doesn't work with my GPS.