I’m self-employed. Historically I’ve used my landline as my primary point of contact, but my ISP has seemingly botched the analog line to digital voice service migration, leaving me with a situation of a landline that receives some (maybe even most) phone calls, and other callers get “number not recognised”.
Unless my ISP pulls a rabbit out of a hat, I’ve resigned myself to changing my primary point of contact to my work mobile number, and logically if it’s going to take more work on and become more indispensable, I should upgrade from my very ageing Moto G5 (Android 8.1). My personal phone isn’t as old (Nokia 8.3, Android 12).
If the whole “bigger is better” mobile phone war hadn’t happened then I would have been reasonably happy to get a replacement work phone of a similar size to my Moto G5, but that’s not on the cards apparently.
As things currently are, carrying two phones is a bit of an irritation, and will become more irritating when summer comes (being a guy, handbags are out, surfboard phones don’t go into trouser pockets without doing us a mischief, etc). With a larger work phone, I’ll run into the problem I currently have with my Nokia 8.3 in that if I’m picking out a new jacket, I need to check if a breast-ish pocket can take a phone that size. Two surfboard phones equal at least twice as large a problem.
Previously I’ve considered a phone holster type situation, but I haven’t seen anything online that IMO fits the bill, let alone one that can take two.
My main idea at present is to get a phone to replace both of my phones and it has to have dual-SIM (physical SIMs as my friend who is more pro-tech than I am doesn’t trust eSIMs yet and he trusts all kinds of stuff I don’t!). The two physical SIMs requirement has limited my choices quite a bit, and gsmarena.com incorrectly lists phones as being dual-SIM and even suggesting they can take two Nano-SIM cards when the official specs say they can’t; I therefore regard gsmarena’s search system to be useless in this respect.
I have two misgivings about the dual-SIM idea: 1) what if dual-SIM capabilities on Android don’t work as well as I hope, 2) I’m concerned about apps and data harvesting.
Dual-SIM capabilities on Android: I want to be able to specify (and preferably be able to choose at the point of starting a new text conversation as well as creating a new contact) which SIM gets used, I want to be confident that when I make a phone call that it’s not using my personal number for work purposes. I’m curious about whether Do Not Disturb features can work on a SIM-specific basis, but overall I think that if I go into DND mode, it’ll probably be global rather than SIM-specific.
Apps and data harvesting: For example, I won’t have a Meta app on my personal phone as I don’t trust Meta as far as I could throw them. However, if my phones were separate going forward, maybe I’d consider having Whatsapp on my work phone as customers ask if I have it, but even then I know that Whatsapp wants to rifle through my contacts (which isn’t sync’d anywhere and I back it up manually, and I’ve been populating that list with lots of customers’ names, addresses, etc) and I can probably say no but will it be a total PITA if I say no.
I’m trying to look at this problem from every possible angle to be confident that I haven’t overlooked a much easier way of doing things.
I don’t want to spend tonnes on a new dual-SIM phone only to find that it doesn’t work as well as I hoped. I’m looking at a Samsung A56 at £500 UKP as the highest I’m willing to go (though the S25 being 50g lighter and physically smaller is tempting, but costs a lot more if I want at least 256GB storage).
If anyone has any advice that might help me with this, it would be much appreciated!