After some extensive and rather bizarre searches aided by Googles helpful new translated search feature I finally found how to set your service password for a China Unicom mobile number. This allows you to Log In to their online services and do other things like link your number to an existing account. Much discussions on Chinese forums told me the default number was ’123456′ which obviously did not work as a login to their site, but after more searching I found you can change your service number without phoning the service line (something I was a little reluctant to try given my Chinese is not great). Here’s how:

Simply text the following:

MMXG#123456#NEW_PASSWORD#NEW_PASSWORD

to

10010

And that’s it! This works for my new number which is of the ’186′ breed. Your new password must be numbers only and no longer than 6 characters. I think. Below is some Chinese which might hopefully help someone out there…

就发这个短信：

MMXG#123456#<新密码>#<新密码>

到

10010

我有联通的186号码，对我有用！

It’s been a few months since the whole ‘Antenna Gate’ outpouring of anger over the iPhone 4′s signal attenuation problems when held in a certain way. I get asked by friends whether it has a problem and I have to answer truthfully that I’ve had only one distinctive occasion on which the signal dropped and caused a noticeable drop in audio quality, and that was at my home in Scotland where the signal is poor on the best days.

But here’s the thing. In normal use this phone definitely has better voice quality and reception than any phone I’ve had before, including my Android running Motorola XT800. This has been confirmed here in the most in depth and objective reviews of the phone.

I can make calls in the garden at home when I never used to be able to, walk around inside our house in Beijing (we are in a null reception zone on the 20th floor of a tower block), and enjoy better audio quality and call quality than ever before. The second thing I say to curious friends is that the antenna issue was mostly a gross marketing error, not a technical one. By drawing attention to external aerials and the join between them, Jobs put his foot in arguably Apple’s most embarrassing PR mishap ever. But as one of the 99.9% of the iPhone 4 owners who has not asked for a refund, I am just happy this phone makes great calls!

Which makes sense, because I believe, although I’m not an iPhone app developer, that the way push notification works is something like this:

(Facebook) App Server  —-*push update*—->  Apple Push Notification Server  —-*push update*—->  iPhone (connecting from China)

If you didn’t already know, Facebook and Twitter were blocked in China for the final time last year during the Ürümqi Riots. Since then, there has been no access to those domains. For expats interested in useful things like Facebook and Twitter, there are ways to ‘jump over’ the great firewall.

Side-note: This is an unaltered 100% scale screenshot from the iPhone 4 which demonstrates the incredible 960×640 resolution. I was amazed to find the full length shot could not fit on my laptop’s screen. The image above only shows a small top section of the screen but if the icons look big on your computer you get a feel for just how many pixels there are on that little device’s screen.