I’m back from the trip, with some lessons learned, but overall I would have to say that it was a success!

The SIM arrived before I left, but my attempt to add money to it came to nothing. I tried to login on the T-Mobile UK website, but they wanted to send a PIN to the cell phone. As I was 5,000 miles away this did not work of course. No problem, I thought, as soon as we land I’ll turn the phone on and I’m sure the text message will be waiting.

Wrong. I turned on the phone and nothing happened. Oh, it powered up OK, just nothing I could do with it without adding some cash. As it turned out there might have been more to do.

We checked in at the hotel and I enquired about the nearest Car Phone Warehouse and T-Mobile stores. I was directed to Slough (just west of Heathrow airport).

It is strange how “alone” you feel when you rely on your phone for GPS, web access, etc. We headed west to Slough. We found the mall and checked the map at the entrance. There was a Car Phone store. On the way to it I saw a T-Mobile store just outside a mall exit. I took this as a good omen.

At Car Phone I threw myself on their mercy, hoping they would be geeky enough about phones to want to educate/help me. I was right. Great customer service. They said I needed the T-Mobile store for the phone, but while there I purchased a T-Mobile USB stick for use with my laptop. Cost: GBP25 plus GBP10 for air-time. I converted GBP7.50 of that to a 10-day, 3Gb Internet pass. About $48 total.

Next stop T-Mobile. Again, pretty good customer service. They did not recognize my phone (despite the fact that they sold a similar model not too long ago). They found a similar one in their records and transmitted their settings to me. I added some air-time. I had wanted to add three of their “Booster Packs”, but apparently you can only add them sequentially and not consecutively. I opted for the GBP2.50 “web-n-walk” data access as I wanted to get my Exchange corporate email on it.

Back at the hotel, the USB stick on the laptop worked well. The only problem was that, for some unknown reason, I could not delete email using the browser-based Outlook Web Access (OWA) with either my corporate or home Exchange servers.

With the phone, I was able to make/receive calls and my Exchange email flowed perfectly. Again there was a small problem. When  I used the web browser I could not display any web sites. ”504 Gateway Timeout Error” was all I could get. Not the end of the world. I have since found a better “match” for my phone than the one they used and I’m hoping on the next trip that I can get that piece to function correctly. It may not be related, but it is a good first step.

As we travelled north, to where we were staying, Google maps worked OK with the built-in GPS of the phone. On arrival, bad news. Almost no signal with the laptop. The phone was still OK, but I could not get the laptop and USB to work. No problem, as my brother had a good signal and DSL.

Conclusion

I now know a lot more about SIM-based technology than before. And I proved that I can access the stuff I need to get at to perform my job just as well from 5,000 miles, as from my home.

An unqualified success. I look forward to more trips.