The second was figure out how to set up my phone with local service. Naturally, I only fully figured it out on the second to last day. Thailand, unlike most countries, has both GSM and CDMA networks. The GMS Nexus One worked with Thailand's One-2-Call (AIS) service. I foolishly didn't attempt to set up service in the airport in Bangkok, and instead went to a mall in Chiang Mai, but after some language issues and a lot of walking back and forth with no clear choice out of about 40 cell phone and service vendors I was passed along to a girl who must have spent about 45 minutes trying to configure my phone for 3G service to no avail. Finally I gave up, and even though I had bought a 3G capable SIM card, just asked them to put some calling minutes on it.
The next day, of all places on the top of Doi Suthep, 3G service suddenly kicked in. I was pleasantly surprised, and started using it to send emails and snapshots with the camera. Later that day I took a long bus ride to Chiang Rai, where I was to meet up with my friend Tevra after she crossed the border from Laos. Close to the end of the ride my phone blipped and I looked down to see a message from my provider saying that my minutes had been used up. The card was allowing me 3G service, but somehow spending my talking minutes to do it, and at a very rapid rate. Thus I blew the primary reason I'd brought the phone (for coordination with fellow travelers), at least for the first week. Afterward I got more minutes, shut off as many "auto-syncing" apps as possible (there's what looks like a master switch for syncing, but I'm not sure it gets everything) and put it into airplane mode when I though I could. It turns out that while you can turn off 3G service (to conserve power), you can't turn off Edge, and so even with 3G turned off it would just default to Edge whenever a process thought it should be online.
This continued until my last day in Chiang Mai, when I went to another mall and tried to get a 3G service again. This time I was told, rightly or wrongly, that 3G only really worked in Chiang Mai (surely it must work in Bangkok as well), and that an Edge plan was a better, more economical bet. Now here's the thing, there are three types of services through One-2-Call: voice (by the minute), 3G where you pay be the Gigabyte (I think the standard options were .5GB, 1GB and 1.5GB), and Edge, where you pay by the hour. I think 50, 100 and maybe 200 where options.
The next tricky part comes with paying, and that's something I only finally figured out at the very end. Fully equipped cell phone/provider stores are somewhat rare outside of malls, and the technical nature negotiating out a cell phone contract with limited English and zero Thai make all of this quite a chore. In contrast, buying minutes is trivial: you walk into 7-Eleven (never more than half a block away) and tell them your service, and buy a card with a code for adding minutes.
So I tried to buy Edge service at a 7-Eleven, and the girl there referred me to a phone number. Using the phone number I was able to speak with an English-speaking operator who sorted out what I wanted (50 hours of Edge to cover my last two days in Bangkok, arguably the most important period for me to have a phone) and then she told me what the charge was. At this point you then buy regular service cards at 7-Eleven until you have enough to cover the cost of the service you've ordered. When you enter in the codes, the service provider knows to apply the money to the service instead of just to minutes.
Anyway, the next time I'm in Thailand I'll know exactly what to do.
