@Paul_Sengupta et al,
What a palaver! I ordered my free “3” sim several weeks ago (when still in lockdown) after seeing the early part of this thread. When it arrived, I put it in my iPad Mini 5 and tried to register with ‘3’ as per the instructions in the package, but couldn’t get past the locking screen mentioned by most others, so called the ‘3’ help desk. They got me to a point where I apparently had a ‘3’ account but apparently ‘3’ sends the password to the device containing the sim by text - unfortunately iPads don’t ‘do’ texts, so the help desk very unhelpfully suggested I visit my nearest ‘3 shop’ - which was still in lockdown, so I gave up.
Having come across Paul’s workround in this thread last night - I temporarily changed the APN designation in APN Settings from ‘three.co.uk’ to ‘3internet’ (with NO other changes) and it connected, led me through registration and gave me my free data, but
still no password, so I returned the APN to ‘three.co.uk’ and went to bed.
This morning, after a rethink, I pulled up the ‘My3’ Page and tried to login - still without the (previously ‘texted’) password of course - and tried ‘Forgot Password’ to try to get it to send me a password reset link. Guess what.... despite having my registered e-mail and the ‘forgot password’ screen saying it would send a reset link by e-mail or text, it chose to send it by text...
I then had a (bit of a) brainwave... I swapped the sim into my (fortunately unlocked) Galaxy S9+ (which is normally on 02), then connected to the ‘My3’ screen and retried the login - forgot password trick and ‘Bingo’ received a text with a temporary password, which finally allowed me to login to ‘My3’ and reset my password to something I can actually use - and while I was there, check that my free 200Mb of data had actually been allocated. I then swapped the SIM back to my iPad Mini and ‘Hello World’ - 3G Internet Access. (I’m not sure what happened to 4G mind you - possibly something to do with being right on the boundary of Three’s reported signal coverage area), but at least it seems to be working!
So
Thank You Paul! for your prompt, but to repeat what I said above
What a Palaver ! - If that’s Three’s idea of good marketing they are certainly not promoting themselves as my ‘Go-to provider’.