Phones are starting to drop physical sims in the US. I was surprised to find out that my pixel 10 doesn’t have one.
Comment on You must have an internet connected smartphone to eat
ieGod@lemmy.zip 8 hours ago
I spent three weeks in China this year, had a blast. It’s true you need an app for nearly everything, and while it’s too late for this advice, I’d recommend before you go:
- download/install alipay (skip wechat, it’s less prevalent)
- add and set up your CC from your home country before you arrive in china
- have a VPN ready to go, setup before you leave (mullvad worked perfectly for me)
- get a physical SIM in China, and get one with high data caps; they’re cheap, you might as well
Once you’ve got the physical sim, you’ll have fewer issues with phone verification (obviously). Good luck, god speed.
For wechat verification, I had to have a third-party (i.e. one of my chinese friends) perform a verification for me before all options unlocked. If you don’t know anyone there, this is obviously challenging.
False@lemmy.world 8 hours ago
Pruning9165@feddit.org 7 hours ago
My experience with esims is fantastic. I loaded 5 of them on my phone (bought cheap plans with low data tiers) and switch them accordingly. High speed, no censorship at all, decent lag to western sites, I’m not detected as a VPN user.
Arrived in the airport, toggled, worked.
Physical SIM… Didn’t try this year but even 6 years ago it was extremely problematic to get one as a foreigner, no store would accept my form of identification, I was offline for three days until I caved in and finally paid 200 yuan extra for a preactivated one (on someone else’s id , I guess) on the grey market. And then there’s the problem that even if the plans are cheap (I’m seeing $1/month for 5gb), it’s rendered useless by the gfw. What’s the point of having 200 Mbits of 5g bandwidth if any website that you can think of (including hexbear and .ml surprisingly, I wouldn’t expect that they would block tankies), is banned? Better using a HK esim at 30mbits in 4g but with the full internet unlocked…
VPNs it’s a cat and mouse game that I don’t want to play anymore. You never know if the website isn’t loading because the VPN has been blocked, or the website blocked the VPN, or it’s a temporary connection issue, or today the server is overloaded…