Gadgetory

so I'm just about to head up to China and I finally got my theis M so I have heard that apparently you can just go straight to China with Google Phi and just get around the Great Firewall so that's what I'm going to test here I'm gonna make the see what the speeds are like in China see if I can access sites that you normally can't access on just regular Chinese internet so let's go yes I also just picked this up on the way because my computer ran out of storage so it's a portable SSD so gonna use that yeah okay so finally got to Shenzhen it's been like 19 hours or something I'm very tired but as you can see on my phone I'm gonna throw a little pop-up up here it just says welcome to China as soon as you walk into China when we own over Russia is that Vulcan to Russia so even though if my cellular data off Google was still kind of able to triangulate where we were kind of welcomes you to every country that you pass through an airspace that's pretty cool so far I've been able to use the internet with no problems you can access any website even once that are blocked by Chinese IP is like Facebook so I'm gonna talk to Josh more about this in a bit when I see him tomorrow so I will talk to you guys then oh all right you thought me we I found Josh yeah so yeah we are gonna talk about project I in China cuz we're in Shenzhen right now we wanted to show you the backdrop but it would blow out the cameras and we wanted to also film downstairs but they kind of gave us a little bit of crap for it but it's okay we're in China and I was in Shanghai and I came down here to Shenzhen where David is working on some Oppo content so yeah obviously for us being here in China we had to have some sort of SIM card my original plan was to come here and get a card here that had the highest and the most high speeds and the most data but I think it was you actually that said you were gonna use project Phi and you got your card like literally a day or two before he got here yeah so Josh was spending some time in San Francisco with me and I mentioned that I was getting my Phi sim and then we started talking about like oh does it get good speeds and yeah I mean in China you get LTE like Google has some sort of weird relationships I did not believe that when you said because I used t-mobile for the longest time and even though it would work in other places you have to pay for for faster speeds right so when you said that it would still use full speeds on there I did some research I ended up on like Reddit in a few places and yeah they corroborated what David said so I'm not only using Phi I'm using it on the phone that I actually covered in Shanghai the xiaomi c ami me makes 2s yeah and yeah as long you can use this so it's it's so useful it says so good look we use Google Drive we use all these Google services and if you just use the the Internet at the hotel then you can't access those so you need a VPN or you can tether from Project fight and since they have the bill protection now and you get unlimited data over six gigs I haven't really worried about any of this I just been tethering from my phone like six or seven I'm six it's at six okay so the maximum you can pay every month is $80 okay well for just for context I I'm connected to it right now I do have a little bit of a story about getting it to work with this phone but you get the project fly app here and of course it'll tell you how much you've used now amateur those are amateur numbers I know you were just raised okay so I'm up to about two gigs for the amount of time that I've been here over the last couple of last number of days but I've been using this card for the last like two weeks lucky numbers oh my goodness rookie numbers 0.7 there really were behind it so you up to my ignite bytes so I was watching a lot of YouTube that's the thing so obviously you would want to sort of cater your usage to make sure you're not paying let us say up the wazoo yes but there is bill protection and it's only $10 more than the unlimited plan I was already paying for on t-mobile but then again it doesn't give you full speeds abroad this does generally and and in many places and you know what I would be very I would be I'm very impressed I would be very impressed if because Phi is at full speed in China that means it should be full speed everywhere right pretty much yeah my god that's amazing they just keep upping the number of countries that they're in I wish I've had that I've come to China so many times at one time with Android Authority and I wish I wish I had this kind of connectivity here because since as you said Phi has some sort of deal with Chinese telex some sort of Chinese telecom because Google wants to be able to say we you can go to any country and it works the same way in every country and that's it they don't want to be like oh but in China you can't use any Google services because that would be very bad for their branding yeah so what I'm assuming and I actually reached out to Google on this I'm waiting first once right now but I'm assuming they they have some sort of deal with a local telecom that like allows them to get over the Great Firewall so you're pretty much stable just do whatever you would do anywhere yeah and just popping into sim like okay so we're both using pixels but I'm using this right now so I do have my pixel and using the ECM on there it's really easy the pixel is probably the most well equipped phone for this kind of international data usage because it already has all of the information that it needs and it can pull it really easily yeah and of course you could use the ESM which is kind of nice right so if you don't know Danny sim is it's a newer thing that Google has in the pixel twos that any phone yeah the only phones that have them right now but basically it's project files like embedded in the phone so like you don't have to get a sim I did because I like we switch phones a lot and I if I figured if I'm doing any Oppo content with an opah phone I want to be able to just throw it in there yeah exactly so that was exactly what happened like you have to I believe you have to register the sim using a pixel or you can any project file like registered device so like there's the Moto X for there's the there's like a third I can't remember the other phone yeah I believe slightly older Nexus devices our Nexus devices work - yeah or the the most recent Nexus device yes so yeah once I got the sim registered it just popped it into here and actually okay I had a little bit of trouble at first because the for whatever reason it worked once I landed in Shanghai but then over time it started to like lose connectivity and then at some point it just stopped like it only gave me the emergency calls only notification or whatever you call that and I did some research I was getting really frustrated for about a day because I was like I brought project fire here to be able to do this and finally I realized oh maybe it doesn't have the information I have to manually put the access point name I don't know if maybe I'll put it in the description below or something like that but if you if you are traveling abroad and you don't have the APN you have to go into your settings to the mobile networks and do it all manually so it's actually really easy there's really there's only a few like lines you have to change on the APN and then you just put it in and then it should work after that okay once I did that finally it was okay so it's not your mileage might vary there might be a little bit of a beginning learning curve or you might have to put some settings in yourself but once you have it ready it's yeah great so like it really depends on your usage right if you're in the US and you don't go to other countries very often t-mobile's unlimited plan might be better because they it's ten or cheaper and then they throttle at 22 gigs whereas five it's unlimited but it throttles to 128 kilobytes per second at 15 gigs yeah usage but it's just a lot though 15 is a lot I mean I am at 9 already but that's because I've been you know tethered like tethering to my computer and everything but if you're in the US you don't travel very often timo is probably a better option but like just for us cuz we go we just got back from MWC you know we were all over Europe I went to four places in Europe now we're in China it's just like to not have to think about it and like I said before like you fly into another country and it just says welcome to this country like ah it's that easy right if you keep if you keep domestic and you just want to set it and forget it type of SIM card or phone service than any of the unlimited plans back home would be great but I would argue and maybe this is something we can talk about in a future thing and you can also let us know in the comments down below if you think this is a good idea I'm actually planning now to cut my t-mobile because when I'm at home and I'm in Wi-Fi and stuff like that maybe I should just cater my usage so that I can have the lowest possible bill right so you can't like if you know you're not gonna travel internationally that month and you're not gonna use that much data you can just if I acted actually actively tries to find Wi-Fi networks and I think that's why it's called fie right like it's aggressively trying to find a Wi-Fi mm-hmm and so you can really you could have an incredibly cheap if you use less than a gig then your bill is gonna be like $25 twenty-five or thirty dollars or something like that and I think that's exactly what I'm going to do because as long as I'm making I'm making it might be a little bit painstaking but I'm as long as I'm making the effort to download offline and to do all that stuff then there you go or just be on Wi-Fi even also if you have a phone that has a lot of bands like the pixel because the pixel also works on Verizon and those kind of networks you can turn roaming on and roaming is actually free so if I will actively switch between whatever networks are the least congested at the time so in uses t-mobile as a baseline but then it'll be it'll jump to sprint and if you turn on roaming which you have to do in the settings so not a lot of people know about it but it's free then it'll actually roam on Verizon if you don't have good t-mobile that's really cool which is amazing because Verizon has a great coverage and they're fast yeah yes so so that's I think that's the main takeaway here is like we we we got project five Sims to experiment with them in an international sense yeah and China is one of the hardest places to actually access everything you want to do if you are from outside of China and sure enough bringing this here it was like a plug-and-play situation and it was also easy immediate access to all Google services and all that so I guess the takeaway here and you can let us know what you think in the comments below and we'll get into some conversations about you guys what service do you use and if you're a project 5 member what if your experience has been I think the takeaway here is we use it abroad and it makes us want to use it at home yeah yeah yeah Wi-Fi most the time anyway um so it's yeah actually view in a work environment you're on Wi-Fi anyway and then like I said just download offline and it'll it'll cut a lot of the data that you might end up using on any given point anyway so yeah I think there should pretty much do it there are reactions a project fire broad Assoc in the Chinese content yes specifically in China and it's great if you're gonna come to China if you do a lot of business and China project 5 might be the best deal you you can like you can pause your service too so even if you just know you're gonna come to China for like a little bit you can active I to activate a project 5 sim go to China with your temporary number or whatever and then you can pause your service for up to 3 months or you can just deactivate it and that number just disappears but it's like whatever and just exactly activate it at any time with a different number so the possibilities are kind of endless there so yeah I mean this might sound like a bit of an edge tech not net does not is not a net for project fight this is literally how we feel about this service that I honestly feel like I wish I had after coming to check cuz I come to China at least three four times a year for Hendra thority and I wish I had it every single one of those times yeah so yeah yeah I said before let's no thoughts in the comment section below and make sure you stay tuned for other stuff alright so thank you so much for watching we had our discussion about project 5 and also don't forget to watch these Jean me mix 2's hands-on as well as any Content that David is doing currently right now here in China for Oppo and whatever devices they have yeah that's coming in too there's also a couple of things that you can watch across our different network so make sure you follow all of those follow us on social media and yeah that should pretty much do it so remember that Andhra Authority is of course your source for all things project and I every time sorry every time you