Using my cell in China, help!
 

Hello all,

I just bought a Samsung e315. It has the 900MHz, which I understand works in China. I'm currently a T-Mobile customer and I've been calling them to request information about using my phone. What I have discovered is that to text send/rec it will be .35$ a message which is nothing. However, calling in China is a little bit different. It will be like 2$ a minute.

A lot of people have talked about purchasing SIM cards in China and using those. However, if I was to buy one of those, would it work for international calling back to the US? How much would this cost?

Lastly, T-Mobile was vague about how often my phone would work in China. They basically told me that it will work in China, but not in all of China. That's not really helpful. The cities that I'll be visiting are Beijing, Xi'an, Nanjing, Suzhou, Hangzhou, and Shanghai. I'm hoping that it will work in these cities! Can anyone help me out and let me know if I will be able to use my phone in these cities?


Thanks for all the help!

The answer is which system you will use.

Let's try this again...

I found out that my phone should work in all of the listed cities if I want to use the expensive calling rates.

But can somebody tell me more about the SIM cards that you can buy in China? From what I understand you can buy a SIM card for about $12 and it will give you a local number. So if I bought one of these cards could I use it to call back to the US and how long would this card last me? Lastly, would it work in most of China?

I assume you purchased your phone from T-Mobile. Is it unlocked yet? If not, ask them if they'll send you the unlock code (I've heard that T-Mobile will do this if you've been a customer for X number of months). Your phone has to be unlocked in order to use any SIM other than the T-Mobile SIM. If T-Mobile won't unlock your phone, you can google your phone model + the word 'unlock'.

To call back to the US from China using a prepaid SIM purchased in China should be around $1 per minute (receiving incoming calls costs much less). There are some programs which reduce the per minute cost but I believe you have to dial a certain access code and I have no experience with this. You can purchase additional prepaid top up cards in various amounts as needed. There's a number that you can dial to check your remaining balance. You'll be able to use the same SIM throughout the country, although there may be slight variances in per minute rates when you're traveling outside of the 'home territory' where you originally purchased the SIM. But the rate variance is minimal, so I wouldn't worry about buying a new SIM every time you change locations.

T-Mobile may or may not be able to unlock the Samsung. I used to have another Samsung 900/1900 model, the R215 or something, and it wasn't unlockable with the code they gave me. I didn't find any paid or free service on the internet to unlock that phone either.

Maybe it's different with the e315, may be not.