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Comment by smackeyacky | Hacker News Reader

Your phone will be a brick for the entirety of your stay. A vpn is the only way to access google services in china.

There are other services than google though. Why would the phone be a brick?

I’d say when I travel I rely on Google maps. Without it, yes it is still possible to find your ways but it is so much easier using those maps on the phone especially in non-English areas.

Does Google maps even work in China? I thought that China used a different coordinate system.

It does work. The "different" coordinate system is only a facade.

Why would you want to use Google Maps in China? All the crowdsourced information wouldn't be available and the government is hostile to it. Wouldn't it be better to use whatever the Chinese competitor is?

Unless your goal is to read about Tiananmen Square in Tiananmen Square. Which just doesn't sound smart.

Obviously, it's different if you live there. But on a two-week vacation it doesn't seem worth it.

Its just not as easy as that. Most of the chinese services are tied to wechat or whatever and english support is patchy.

Without Google services your phone is a brick? You can use Apple services, Microsoft services, any number of other websites. People really like to dramatize the GFW.

On an android phone, 5 years ago, it turned into a brick when i stepped out of shenzhen airport. There is a surprising amount of chatty network stuff going on under the hood that stops working. I ended up using a vpn which fixed it. Even basic stuff like contacts no longer worked .

Plus without gmail, you can't recover a password or in some cases authorise yourself on 3rd party services.

It was a brick.

When you stepped out of the airport and swapped in a domestic SIM?

Probably using local Wi-Fi.

So he stepped out of the airport and connected to WiFi? Why not use cellular data?

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