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Sep. 5th, 2007

09:17 pm - Mobile phones

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Apropos of nothing much, I've been thinking about mobile phones recently. Manufacturers tend to keep adding extra features, and I'm sure that some people (particularly teenagers) find them useful, but I hardly ever use my phone to take photos, watch videos, or play music. Instead, here's my idea for something that would be really useful: a dual-SIM phone.

I know a few people who carry two mobiles around with them, one for personal use and one for work/SJA. So, suppose that you could fit two separate SIM cards into the same physical phone. For incoming calls, both SIMs would make the phone ring; you could assign separate ring tones if you wanted to (as you can now for particular caller numbers), and it would handle simultaneous calls in the same way that current phones do (e.g. beep and say "call waiting"). For outgoing calls, you'd have a slider control on the side of the phone to select the SIM (I have something similar on the remote control that handles TV/DVD/VCR), and the call would be charged to the relevant bill.

Anyway, feel free to steal this idea, royalty free. There may even be scope for a "3 SIM" phone in the future, in the manner of those razors that use multiple blades. How many is just too damn many? We may never know.

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From:susannahf
Date:September 5th, 2007 08:55 pm (UTC)
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orange do something like this - I think it's called "Line 2", but you only need 1 SIM. totherme uses it I think. Although I can see a use for having a 2-SIM phone where you have two different networks to cover dead spots
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From:susannahf
Date:September 5th, 2007 08:58 pm (UTC)
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of course, no network would want to sell such a phone for fear of losing custom to the "other" network(s). So it would probably only be sold direct to the consumer, thus making for a very small market, unless one of the Phones4u-type places jumped on it, which is possible (double commission?)
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From:shuripentu
Date:September 5th, 2007 10:25 pm (UTC)
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In Finland, and probably in other countries, it's actually illegal to sell phones bundled with network contracts, which is what has become the standard in the UK. As a result, people pay a bit more for their phones, seeing as they buy them directly from the retailer, but they also pay cheaper network rates, since the networks don't have to hike prices to pay for the "free" and "discounted" phones that come bundled with their contracts.

In markets like that, I think a dual-SIM phone would probably sell very well.
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From:stagknight
Date:September 6th, 2007 09:01 am (UTC)
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We need that law. SRSLY.
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From:totherme
Date:September 6th, 2007 09:17 am (UTC)
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I think that "line 2" is part of the GSM standard, but basically only Orange, and a subset of the phones on the market support it.

Do you imagine your dual sim phone as being something that can receive calls on either sim at any time? That strikes me as possibly quite hard, since I imagine the radio kit in the phone is tuned in to the local frequency of the network it's talking to at any given time. To talk to two networks simultaneously, wouldn't you need two radio receivers? And double the battery capacity to drive them both? In that case, why not just carry two phones?

On the other hand, if you want to be able to switch from one to the other, then something like elvum's link might be right up your street ;)
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