The frustrations of tech travel. Some things are easy, some things you think are going to be easy are hard. Like in-room Internet. The last Hong Kong hotel I stayed in had free Internet, but you had to enter a fiddly name and password to get a connection, and even if the account said it was valid for 1000s of hours, it would usually expire after about 24 of them, and you had to troop down to the lobby to get some more.
The hotel I’m now staying in has a much easier setup — just plug and play, no accounts or anything — but you still need an ethernet cable. I usually carry one of these around, but as they took an hour to bring me my luggage I had to hunt around the room for a cable, eventually calling up the concierge.
And then there’s GPRS. Why don’t prepaid cards support GPRS? They support MMS, but the carrier I’m using in Hong Kong doesn’t support it unless you’re a postpaid customer. Why is this? It seems daft to me. Or am I missing something?