For quite a while now I have kept playing around with my SIM cards, trying to figure out where calls, texts and mobile data are cheapest. About a month ago I bought a Tesco Mobile SIM card, having been carried away by the hype around virtual operators, and once I got home I ran into a problem: which phone should I put it in? At the time, these were the phones I had in working order
- Nokia 101 (DualSIM, a dumbphone)
- SE Xperia Mini Pro (a smartphone)
And precisely because I have 2 SIM cards with paid and activated data plans, I needed a second smartphone. I used to have 2 more smartphones, but now one has a hardware problem, the other a software problem, and neither of them is usable. So I started making plans. I was on a plan that only let me spend 120 CZK on calls at a 75% discount, so once I used that up, I would call from the Tesco Mobile card, where a minute of calls outside Tesco Mobile costs 2.9 CZK and a minute to Tesco Mobile numbers costs 1.5 CZK.
That is why one day I started looking around for phones, especially DualSIM smartphones. There were mainly 2 available, the Samsung Galaxy S Duos and the Samsung Galaxy Core Duos . What really annoys me is that I paid 4,800 CZK for it, because I needed it RIGHT AWAY and CLOSE TO HOME, while back then it was selling for 3,800 CZK and today you can even get it from 3,650 CZK. As the saying goes, whoever buys it for 4,800 CZK loses out.
But now to the phone itself. At first it looked like it would be my second phone that I would have only for a short time. The first was a white SE Xperia Mini Pro, which I had for 3 days before it fell on the ground right under a bus and was smashed to pieces. This phone I had for just 1 day. Then it fell into the toilet, and as if that were not enough, it broke into 3 pieces (phone, battery, back cover).
I pulled it out immediately, but since it had no covers on anything, not even on the USB port, it got thoroughly soaked. That night I did not dry it much, if I remember correctly; I only turned the heater up to full power for about 10 minutes, then switched it off and went to bed. I did not dry it much because I did not want to melt it (today I know that you cannot melt a phone on a radiator, even a scorching hot one), and since it would not even turn on, I thought it was gone for good.
But when I managed to turn it on on the second or third day, I started drying it. Only a little at first; within a day the little speaker fixed itself, which until then had only made a screeching noise whenever it was supposed to play something, and after that I dried it more and more. Sadly, that may not have been entirely necessary, because I still could not get it to connect to the 3G network of Vodafone, and I thought it was because of that bath. It was not; it was because I had WCDMA only in the settings, and VF has no 3G coverage here, whereas O2/Tesco Mobile do.
Then there was one more problem, specifically with charging. When I plugged in the charger with the phone switched on, the battery icon started blinking and the phone reported that the battery was disconnected. When I plugged in the charger with the phone switched off, it displayed a little phone with a yellow warning triangle, which was probably meant to say the same thing.
I no longer hoped I would ever charge that phone again (and I had 2 batteries, one straight from the phone’s box and an extra one bought for 300 CZK). But then luck smiled on me, and after about 2 more days of drying, the phone started charging as if it had never had an accident. In total I dried it for almost a week, but it paid off; I did not have to throw the phone away. Then I wanted to return the phone, because if I were to buy something now, it would probably be a Windows Phone because of its dazzling battery life. But I did not succeed, even though I had bought it through an online shop, because the salesman at the counter recognized that it had been in the toilet and already wanted to write it up and take photos, and the cherry on top of it all was that they would refund me some money (based on their assessment) (only) in two weeks.
So I told him I would rather sell it the usual way through a classifieds site, but then I thought it over and decided to keep it after all. Android is not such a bad OS, and since I wanted a DualSIM phone, I will keep it; after all, I can have just 1 SIM in it when I care about battery life, and when I want to, I can put 2 SIM cards in it. And speaking of SIM cards, how did things turn out with them in the end?
In the Xperia I have the VF I. SIM, in this phone I have the SIM from O2 with a 1GB FUP, and in the Nokia 101 I have Tesco Mobile and the VF II. SIM. I am not using the other SIM cards at the moment, since I do not have phones for them.