I'm moving to Chengdu next month and I want to buy a Nexus One. Are there differences between a Nexus One bought in the US and one bought in, say, Hong Kong? If I buy the phone in the US, will I have the option of a U.I. in Mandarin? Will there be problems using the networks in Mainland China?

(Hope it's ok I ask this here. I know a lot of tech-savvy people use Skritter.)

I bought my Nexus One in the US. The UI is in English but I downloaded the Google Pinyin and it works fine to input Chinese (but isn't near as good a keyboard for English input - no predictive). I'm on China Unicom and it works fine (it shows the 3G icon and all). I'm not sure if there is a way to change the UI to mandarin (maybe, I've not tried).

The phone itself is really nice in terms of resolution and speed, not great on battery life, and not nearly as polished as the iPhone. Also, if you are going to be doing a lot of text entry, especially while walking, go for the Blackberry (or something with a physical keyboard) - the keyboard's not bad for a bit of input but the BB is much faster input-wise.

Of course, you can't access YouTube, etc. in China and the phone doesn't have an option to save a VPN password (I've got connected with my VPN but not got it working yet for some reason I've been too busy to figure out). Not having an option to save the VPN password is very annoying, even for testing the configuration, as entering a complex password on a soft keyboard is a real pain.

If you can manage without much 3G data and you are a light phone user (i.e. you mostly use the phone near WIFI you can access, text often, and Skype on your PC to make calls) you might want to get China Unicom's student package - it's 66RMB/month and gets you 300 Meg (yeah, very little) and 60 min I think (you need to call in and say you are a student - I am, but they didn't do any verification).

Hope this helps.

2shanghai, thanks for the detailed information.

I read an article this morning that worried me. Is this affecting you?

http://www.pcworld.com/article/192838/google_says_mobile_services_in_china_partly_blocked.html

when i was in fuzhou i had mine sent over from taiwan.

there is no difference between the phone for US market or other markets (the box even lists all the countries supported)

in china you need to get unicom,
china mobile uses a different 3G standard which does not work with the N1

when i was there i didnt see much blocked...
well all the paid market apps arent available there :/

hi Maci,

Glad to hear it's the same phone wherever you buy it :-)

Are you sure the Nexus One won't work on China Mobile? I found two articles that seem to suggest otherwise:

http://blog.canghuixu.com/2010/02/nexus-one-in-china-with-china-mobile-m.html

http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/android/thread?tid=14674fdbc379dc20&hl=en

The said that paid market apps aren't available. Is there no access to the Android Apps Store in China?

Hmm, I had trouble downloading app updates last night but just now did an update just fine (which is likely due to flaky internet rather than anything else). Everything else seems to be working fine - sometimes a news story is slow or unavailable but hey, that's the same as on a computer.

I have a TMobile pay-as-you-go chip that lets me download paid apps if I want (you can get one for $10 in the US - apparently they use the chip not your IP to restrict access to paid apps).

From what I understand, you can get edge but not 3G on China Mobile. I switched to China Unicom for this reason (but I guess I could be mistaken).

it does work on monkey mobile, but 3G will not.
i had a china mobile simcard when i was there.

Quote: "From what I understand, you can get edge but not 3G on China Mobile. I switched to China Unicom for this reason (but I guess I could be mistaken)."

thats totally correct.