[sleepy]

Dear all,
I thank you all for your help.

I was in Poland and I am back home now. I am here to report my experience after all the help I got from you.

Actually, there are many shops, mainly shop arcades and department stores open in Warsaw, even on Sunday afternoon.

Before leaving, I had selected IPlus, Plus and Orange (Orange Free na Kartę) as my best choices. Reasons were coverage and availability of 3G/HSDPA (the latter almost essential for Skype to work very well. 3G is sufficient, but sometimes conversation is not good enough) coverage, at least in Warsaw.

When in Warsaw, it was easy to find Hera, Tak Tak and similar SIMs, rather more difficult to find Plus or Orange. Kiosk and similar did not seem to have any, and the big luxurious shops of Orange and Plus were closed.

Anyway, in the new Department store near Centralny in Vobis I found the Iplus SIM. Therefore I got it. I paid 20 PLN and got full 20 PLN worth of traffic (about 66 MB of data transfer). Using it was very easy and it worked at first attempt. Also data speed was good.

The following day, following Przemolog's advice, I went to Plus shop under Marriott and got a regular Plus SIM for 9 PLN. I recharged it and bought 50 MB of traffic for 10 PLN, as he said. Then I used up all the remaining IPlus credit and switched to the Plus SIM.

Recharging the SIM is very easy. If you do not find the scratch cards, people at kiosks sell you via their terminal the credit and give you the number which you have to enter on the phone (*123*CODE#).

All went on well until the traffic in the Plus SIM was almost over. At that moment I tried to renew the data option before the credit was over. I could not understand the polish of the SMS I was receiveing back, but I think they meant that the option was altread active and that I could not have two at the same time. Therefore I closely monitored the credit with *121# in order to renew it as soon as the data was finished.
The counter however does not update in real time and in the end, when I managed to renew the option 2 extra PLN of credit were gone, since I had used data at the normal price.
The same happened the following time I finished the data, but worse, since, while I was trying to renew the option (which I did), I eventually went 15 PLN in debit (the option was renewed, but afterwards revoked).
It was the last day, so it did not matter a lot.

Anyway, I would say that this is a bit of a problem to be taken into account. So, the Iplus is a bit more expensive, but easier to use. The data packets in the Plus SIM are cheaper (and not even the people at the Plus shop seem to know about all this...), but the recharging mechanism is a but more delicate and there is a big risk of using data at the normal rate, however careful one can be.

All in all, a good experience. It does not happen in many places, that you can get into the country, buy the SIM and activate a data option at reasonable rates and almost no time.

The problems I pointed out where minor glitches. I only talked about it just in case!

Thank you again,

Sleepy