From China Mobile to China Unicom – Switching Service Providers

I finally made the switch from China Mobile to China Unicom. I had previously been trying (really hard) to get China Mobile’s GPRS to work on the HTC Tattoo, HTC Hero, and BlackBerry 9700, but nothing would work. I had scoured the internet looking for advice on how to set up the APN’s for these devices on China Mobile, but I’ve come to the conclusion that China Mobile GPRS only works for iPhone users (since it was my iPhone using friends who had suggested I try out GPRS on China Mobile).

//Note: Both CMWAP and CMNET both didn’t work. I actually brought my phone to a China Mobile store too, and the sales clerks had no idea why GPRS wasn’t working either. Womp.

Anyhow, from all the muddling around with China Mobile, here are some random codes that I discovered. China Mobile does have a neat service where you can just send in text messages to 10086, with code in the message content, to carry out various functions with your mobile account

CXGTC – Check your remaining data-plan balance
YE – Check your remaining pre-paid balance
KTSJLL20 – Activate GPRS 20RMB/month plan
QXGPRS – Cancel GPRS plans (yay)

So the reason why I finally changed providers, was because a friend of mine recently bought the Nexus One, and with that purchase, he decided to also go ahead with switching from China Mobile’s GPRS plan (he was using an iPhone previously) to China Unicom’s 3G plan. It was pretty much his doing that I also decided to go for the 3G plan with China Unicom.

For those of you who are thinking about looking into a 3G plan here in Beijing, here’s a link that my friend provided me that breaks down the China Unicom 3G service. I ended up getting the 96RMB/month plan, and I’ll see how much data I use and adjust accordingly.

For those who are interested about the APN settings for China Unicom, here’s what I had to input.

APN: 3gwap 3gnet (3gwap actually doesn’t allow your applications access to the internet)
Proxy: 10.0.0.172
Port: 80

It was a really quick set-up process (apart from my fumbling around with my broke Chinese trying to ask the sales-clerk what APN settings I was supposed to input), and I’m now getting 3G on the HTC Hero. I was thinking of trying out the BlackBerry 9700 again, since I’ve had a couple of Tweet replies encouraging me to give it another try, but after reading this blog about 30%-ish polled BlackBerry users wanting to switch to iPhone or Android, I think I’ll pass.

Anyhow- this was definitely a geek post. Dry, and geeky.

I’ll try spice it up later on this week with some pictures of the phones I’ve been playing around with recently.

-Duncan

Tagged as: 3G, Android, China Mobile, China Unicom, GPRS, iPhone