I wanted to share my experiences regarding traveling through Great Britain and Germany with my iPad.

It should be noted that my son brought his netbook with iTunes on it so it was simple to get the carrier file for microsims. I think if you are travelling without an additional system for the update, a quick visit to an apple store would take care of it.

First stop: Scotland/England

The day after I got to Scotland we found a 3 store. I walked in found a iPad specific sim hanging on the wall, took one and brought it to a rep who took my ten pounds and activated the sim. All in all, it took about five minutes. It popped it in when we got back to the hotel and connected the iPad to my son’s netbook, iTunes popped up, I told it not to sync and then it offered to update the carrier file. I clicked okay and a few minutes later I had 3G up and running with 250 megs of pre-paid data. In my last few days in London I did another 10 pound top-up as we found ourselves relying on the mapping functionality a lot.

Coverage-wise, 3 was quite good. The only places I had problems was when we were on a four-day hike along Hadrian’s Wall where I found the signal coming and going.

All in all it was a great experience and I give it an A.

Second stop: Germany

Germany was a completely different thing.

Both Vodaphone and O2 shops do not have sims in stock. You need to pre-order the sims and have them mailed to a German address. On top of that, one of them (I can’t remember which) wanted 25 euro just for the sim. The reps in the store were always unhelpful, many did not even know that iPad sims were available form their respective companies and several mentioned that because “no one wanted an iPad in Germany” they didn’t see the point in carrying the sims. So, no 3G in Germany for me.

On top of that, WiFi was not all that common. Even places that advertised free wifi often told us it was currently broken.

So, iPad travel experience in Germany: D-