The Dual SIM Experience

[Josh Exmoor]

I just received my 4GB/64GB review model from ASUS yesterday as part of winning the video contest here. A big reason why I was picked, I believe, was that I was previously carrying around three phones: a work phone, a personal phone, and an Android phone I used as a media player. I thought I'd share a few things I've found after transferring both my SIM cards to the Zenfone2. FWIW, my SIM1 is my AT&T work SIM, since they pay for a big data plan, and my SIM2 is a T-Mobile SIM tied to my personal phone number.

Phone-wise everything is more or less okay from what I can tell. Incoming and outgoing calls go as expected. The built in dialer seems pretty good, maybe even great. You have to choose which SIM to use every time you dial, which is a bit annoying, but I'm sure I'll get used to it. It would be nice if there was a way to permanently mark a contact as a SIM1 or SIM2 contact, but if it exists I haven't found it. I still haven't tried a bluetooth call from my car, but I'm hoping incoming and outgoing calls will be handled easily.

One not-so-shocking phone related thing I noticed was the T-Mobile's visual voicemail app doesn't work with the

Text messages are a little more complicated. The built in ASUS SMS app is pretty decent and has a buttons to send from either SIM1 or SIM2. Previously I was using EvolveSMS which I loved, but it's dual SIM support is non existent. It will receive texts from both SIMs fine, but all replies will be sent from SIM1. Since my SIM1 is my work phone (because it has a giant data plan) this is a bit of a deal breaker for me. For me the big loss here is custom notifications. EvolveSMS gave me the ability to assign custom sounds/icons for texts from certain people. I also had it set up to re-notify every five minutes if there was an unread text, something that saved me a ton of times when I didn't heard my phone ring or feel it vibrate. I've also been using MightyText to send and receive texts on my laptop. Once again everything here defaults to SIM1. Both of these things are really annoying to me, but not really ASUS' fault. Apparently the dual SIM implementation is non-standard (at least prior to 5.1) so apps are not really able to be written in a way that supports all dual SIM phones. I'm hoping the popularity of the ZF2 might make some app makers include this ability in a future update, but I'm not holding my breath.

Has anyone else found any hiccups in their workflow using two SIMs?

 

[movielover76]

I'm using dual Sim too, but I have the reverse setup, my personal T-Mobile Sim is sim 1 , work at&t is Sim 2.
Their is a setting for which Sim to default for when using Bluetooth so that should work fine. Myself I prefer picking which Sim to use for each message , it's the same number of button presses as a single Sim phone so I don't mind it.
T-Mobile visual voicemail won't work because it only works over a T-Mobile data connection, that's how it authenticates , my AT&t vvm doesn't work in my setup but T-Mobile does.

Overall I'm really liking being able to consolidate to one phone, the only thing I wish it had was the ability to switch the Sim you use for the data plan via a setting , I'm sure it simplifies the hardware the way they did it but some dual Sim phones let you swap sim to use for the data connection in settings

 

[Shey Allen]

PURCHASED A BLU PHONE AND ULTRA MOBILE PREPAID SERVICE (T MOBILE NETWORK) VISUAL VOICE MAIL WORKED.

TRYING TO SEE IF I CAN USE VISUAL VM WITH A DUAL SIM PHONE?? ONE WORKS NOT SURE IF BOTH WILL