I'll be in Amsterdam for a few days next week and would like to use my 3G iPad for internet. I think I need to buy local sim card, but I could not find any at Schiphol Airport the last time through there.

1. Is there anywhere in Amsterdam where I can buy a sim card,

2. what plan do you recommend for 5 days of use, can I just get a card with a prepaid amount of data?

3. and can I do all the connection with the iPad or do I need to bring along a laptop to sync with ITunes?

1&2:
A T-mobile or Vodafone store In Amsterdam should not be hard to find, both carriers have good options when It come to pre-paid simcards.

3:No need to sync anything If u get a pre-paid card, unless u whant to do backupps, the simcard settings doesent need any iTunes If that what was u ment.

OK, bought a prepaid sim at T-Mobile. Installed it, it asked for a PIN, which I got from the sim card and entered. Now on top left of the screen I've got T-Mobile NL 3G, with lots of signal bars. I open Safari and.....I get "could not activate cellular data network". Go to Settings, Cellular Data is "ON". Sim PIN it already has, I don't know what APN does. Any ideas?

HI !

Go to:

Settings--> Celluar Data --> APN Settings -->

add: epc.tmobile.com

or what does the APN say now ?

APN says "smartsites.t-mobile".

OK now I'm into the internet (I sync'd with iTunes), it comes up with a T-mobile page with three button selections, all in dutch????

So I just hit OK to the middle button selection that says "snelheid optimaliseren" and it all seems to be working.

I wonder if I could have connected without syncing to itunes?

user: t-mobile
password: tm

All in all, not a great experiment. Connection on 3G was shaky and pathetically slow. I wouldn't bother with 3G in the Netherlands, certainly not on T-Mobile. By comparison I just signed in with T-Mobile here in the US, and it is pretty good.

Also find it a pretty awkward experience for someone that cannot speak or read/write Dutch. Feels like Quebec with a language police and everyone is forbidden to post anything in English. When the prepaid sim card ran out, I was directed to the T-Mobile page where I could presumably use my credit card to add credits to my plan, but of course not a single word of English on the page.

You pretty much need to befriend some Dutch person to help you with reading the instructions, of course with the crap 3G bandwidth it all seems to be not so worthwhile anyway.

Maybe everyone is too polite to say it, but when your country is the size of a large farm in Canada, you cannot really expect visitors to spend a few years studying your language. I even tried KPN, who actually had an English translation for their sign-in page. Unfortunately, as soon as you made an error filling something out, the advice and notification was in, you guessed it, Dutch!! So good luck getting past that blockade.

Hey, Rob IJzerman, General Manager, KPN HotSpots, you took the time and effort to translate your reply email to me in English. Maybe you can get your IT page programmers to do the same thing.