My experience of using iPad one month no contract data plan in Hong Kong

I was always fascinated, frustrated and irritated by the fact that, as far as I know, there is No Way to get prepaid data plan for 3G mobile device in all the countries that I care about (US, Taiwan, Hong Kong and Canada). The best thing you can get is by getting a no contract monthly data plan for iPad. Still I will stay for 2 plus weeks in Hong Kong, I decided to give it a shot and get a one month plan for this month.

So I went to Smartone store at Tai Po, stated my intend, and a staff member handled my order. There are 2 plans provided by Smartone, one is the normal $168 30 days unlimited data access (by the way there is another 250Mb caped data plan, but I hate caped data plan and I always can find all the bandwidth that provides to me so I treat the 250Mb plan as not even existed), and then there is another one that cost $199 with some Smartone video streaming value add. The staff member there tried to sell me the 199 plan, but of course I don't care about that. So I picked the $168 one. One thing you should notice about the cost is that you need to pay $12 for some sort of activation fee. So as a whole I actually paid $180, which is not bad at all consider that I pay US$30 per month in US to AT&T anyway.

The whole process took like 30 minutes, including some wait time here and there. After the process, I left the store with a MicroSIM card with some information. I put the card in my iPad And swapped out my AT&T microSIM, and sure enough the system recognise the Smartone data access. One catch, however, is that you HAVE to connect the iPad to iTune desktop application in order to updating some profile information BEFORE you can use your iPad with the new 3G plan. So I couldn't use my new 3G access the moment I left the store at TaiPo. But then I went back home that night, connect the iPad to iTune running on Windows, and after a fast simple update, my iPad started to get data from 3G, which was totally awesome.

To further test the 3G access, I used the 3G access on a bus during my commute to the airport since I had a 4 days Taiwan trip. It's pretty awesome to be able to check location using map, update status on Facebook, check email, download apps, browse the web and write blog while I was having my long ride (it took 40 minutes to get from TaiLam tunnel to airport). The data is worth evert single penny.