I remember a few years ago I ordered a lot of Chinese mobile phones of varying and very cool designs I must say, one had a transformer logo on it which was awesome, and thought I would give you some heads up on some of the problems you might have with them when using them on the different mobile networks.
All of the phones I ordered were tested on the O2 network and work fine for text messaging and calling people or accepting calls. The main problem with them is that they cannot seem to send picture messages even though it says on the boxes and on the phone itself it has MMS and picture messaging. Also a large majority of the phones have settings missing from them that you can't input settings for, but desperately need. This appears to be a software related problem and some settings appear to be uneditable like for setting up your data account for the internet a few had the option greyed out and wouldn't let you select it.
If you call or get O2 to send the details to your phone for your messaging and internet settings, when you input them you may run into some problems with getting access to the Internet or being able to send Multi Media Messages with pictures etc in them. If you tell the customer care people at O2 what phone you have they will look at you with two heads if you were in the room as its Chinese they will tell you its not authorised to be used on their network so cannot fix any problems you have with the phone. You will have to use the instruction manual to figure things out however the manuals are written in a broken English which can be hard to follow.
One of the newer Chinese phones however thank god I ordered only about a year ago for a friend of mine I got the Internet working on it fully along with facebook, Gmail etc. I searched for a while getting the settings for his provider which was O2 as well and had to input the details manually into the phone which worked a treat. It did take about 30 minutes to get it to work but I perservered and got it up and running no sweat at all.
To save some time for people who may be experiencing some problems connecting to the Internet on their phone or sending picture messages, I have included the settings information below for as many networks as I could find. The phone does need to be restarted a few times to ensure settings are saved, so when you put them in and click to access the Internet on a Chinese phone and it doesn't work first time, don't panic, they can be a bit tempramental until you get them up and running, be patient.
One thing I will say about Chinese phones is they do give you a lot of cool accessories with their phones the main bonus with them is they giv eyou 2 batteries which I have never seen any phone in the UK coming with 2 batteries which is impressive. Other phones have nice little touches to them like analog and digital TV which works a real treat specially when on the bus, camping, long road trips anywhere really you can whip it out and watch all local channels or news and stuff really is quite amazing.
Here is the list of settings for each network, if you want settings for any other country in the world, follow the link below to see that countries settings, enjoy:
http://www.quickim.com/support/gprs-settings.html
UK
Operator
|
GPRS APN
|
Username
|
Password
|
Optional Settings
|
Vodafone UK
|
Internet
|
web
|
web
|
-
|
O2 UK (contract)
|
mobile.o2.co.uk
|
web
|
password
|
DNS: 193.113.200.200, 193.113.200.201
|
O2 UK (prepaid)
|
payandgo.o2.co.uk
|
payandgo
|
payandgo
|
-
|
Orange UK
|
orangeinternet
|
[blank]
|
[blank]
|
DNS: 158.43.192.1, 158.143.128.1
|
T-Mobile
|
general.t-mobile.uk
|
user
|
mms
| |
T-Mobile (One2One)
|
general.t-mobile.uk
|
Username
|
one2one
|
-
|
Jersey Telecom
|
pepper
|
[blank]
|
[blank]
|
DNS: 212.9.0.135, 212.9.0.135
|
