A phone without credit is a useless shiny brick

Despite my intention to get a UK SIM right away, I briefly turned on my phone at Heathrow to see if 2degrees would repeat their goodness-you're-in-a-foreign-country act. They didn't, although the phone picked up a roaming signal soon enough. It reset its clock but continued to claim it was in Singapore. What this means I have no idea, apart from that it would probably cost me even more to roam in the UK than in Singapore.

So I turned it off and looked for a Vodafone store (Auckland airport has one, why not Heathrow?). Instead I found a vending machine with SIMs from lots of different providers. They were so expensive I thought they must come with credit, but no such luck - not even the token amount you get with a new SIM in NZ. Possibly I got screwed there. Waiting to find a store would certainly have made it easier to get credit.

The plan was to top up using my debit card, but that proved to be impossible without a UK billing address - at least over the phone. My London contact suggests that topping up online would have allowed me to enter an international billing address. Maybe; I'm sure I've never had to provide any address information when topping up by card in New Zealand, so I suspect the British providers of being unnecessarily parochial. Either way, I had no other internet to hand, and going to sleep seemed infinitely more attractive than going out in search of a convenience store. I eventually got a TopUp voucher this morning, but not before a frustrating game of tag with my contact trying to phone me and me unable to phone back.

The internet worked fine after I'd manually entered the settings I'd printed off the Vodafone website. Is it normal to have to manually enter APN details every time I change SIM? The Desire doesn't pick them up at all, nor retain old settings once the SIM is changed.

Later on, the GPS was incredibly useful in finding an alternative tube station when the one I wanted was closed. Although it does feel weird walking around in a strange, crowded, possibly hostile city with my expensive phone in my hand. The GPS nommed the battery, of course.