It does make browsing flyertalk a lot easier out of the box.

Last week in China was a bloody nightmare. Company email and calendars run from Google Apps platform. I have Blackberry and a VPN as a backup for accessing mails when in China.

Guangzhou - able to access both VPN and Gmail
Haikou - able to access Gmail but not VPN
SanYa - able to access Gmail but not VPN
Xi'an - not able to access either VPN or Gmail
Beijing - not able to access either VPN or Gmail
Tianjin - not able to access either VPN or Gmail

Of course, with 3 days of Blackberry outages thrown in for good measure my voice roaming charges will not be pleasant this month.

Anyone have luck yet trying to use iMessage on an iPhone/pod/pad device yet? (Apple iOS 5)

if facetime was working, I would assume that iMesssage would also.

Here's a reason to block Google services in China.

Dalai Lama & Desmond Tutu hang out on Google+

http://youtu.be/1_HqVFEzY2U

Think you need to change your VPN.
I also had occasional problems like yours connecting to my VPN so I contacted them, they gave me a workaround which works.

Many VPN's have special procedures for China, so before chucking yours out the window, contact the technical support desk for those workarounds. If your VPN is corporate not private, they should be well aware of how to help you out. Some services have special procedures for use on mobile devices.

Assuming you are using a private service: If your VPN is a PPTP-type VPN, those are not reliable for China. Many VPN companies have both SSL and PPTP types of services, with the latter being cheaper. If your VPN is really a proxy server inaccurately calling itself a VPN, those are also no longer reliable for China.

It's worked on many trips to China before without any issues (and indeed worked from Guangzhou on this trip as well). Not the end of the world as the IT folks advised an alternate VPN that did work, but just contributing some data points about which parts of China were in higher levels of "lockdown" last week.

Google/Gmail worked sort of intermittently for me a few days ago in CAN.

Gmail is working okay for again in BJ (for now).

What a coincidence 17th Congress just wrapped up Tuesday.

I still think it's more the "Occupy" movement than the Party Congress. After all, why block access related to foreign stuff instead of domestically related issues?

Rather Xizang, if there's a corelation at all.

It would be nice if FTers would stop dropping sensitive keywords so that others temporarily or constantly based on the Mainland would also be able to read and comment on topics later. Just a thought.

I agree. There is a reason we in China do things like La Sa, T!bet, the Dally Lima, and the Jazmeen Rev, and it isn't because we in China are crappy spellers or fat-fingered. If you are outside China, understand that when you use the actual sensitive words (yes in English) on a forum like this, the filters can pick them up and block the page to viewers inside China. It's bad enough we have to put up with website after website auto-linking to F@cebook and Tw it ter which pretty much kills page loading, but to be blocked from places where we could actually have something useful to say is most uncool. Sometimes a VPN can be used, but a VPN also slows things down pretty seriously in an of itself....and not everybody has a working VPN 100% of the time.

I want to make sure those of you outside China who may not be familiar with our Net Nannies, understand the situation. Good. Carry on, and let's be smart about this sort of thing.

That's a good idea.

BTW better not use n*t n*anny either as they are in litigation with US company in regards to gr**n d*m y*uth