Discussion Thinking of combining my personal phone and work phone into one

[mikeymikec]

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!

 

[bba-tcg]

I'm not sure what there's not to trust on e-sims. I've been using them for several years. It's much easier to find a phone that has a physical sim and an e-sim than one that has two physical sims.

I have found it easier to just have a work phone and a personal phone, though. But, I generally leave my work phone at work and don't do many service calls since I lost a leg. I can, of course, but it's a handy excuse to get equipment brought to me as opposed to me going to them. It's even easy to setup wireless printers (which I detest) in the shop using my work phone as a hotspot that mimics their wireless router.

 

[mikeymikec]

I made the plunge!

I've switched to a Moto G56 (MicroSD + headphone jack ftw), I chose the phone number that I don't have any essential authentication mechanisms attached to be converted to an eSIM, after some activation shenanigans with my network which took about half an hour, it was up and running. No extra apps needed, just a QR code from my network to be scanned by the Settings app.

What follows is a quick how-to for anyone else following in my footsteps. Android 15:

I've named the SIM on my phone so they're easy to identify (Settings > Network & Internet > SIMs & Mobile network). I set outgoing calls to always ask which SIM to use, then I used 'assign a SIM to a contact' to attach all my work contacts to the work SIM and all my personal contacts to the personal SIM. Again in the same Settings page, I set the work SIM to be the default for texting then in the Messages app (tap on a conversation, settings button, details) I switched the contact to the personal SIM. The Messages app also tells you in the conversation view which SIM is being used (with the name you've given it). One can set which SIM to use for mobile data in the same area in the Settings app.

 

[mikeymikec]

Ok, this is really the icing on the cake of the eSIM install shenanigans:

While I was cooking/eating lunch yesterday, I instructed my network to switch to eSIM. I had previously been told various things like they'll e-mail the QR code over but that apparently isn't the case. Instead I had to log out and back in after the migration starts, possibly half an hour after the initiation or maybe immediately or even a day. During login, when it normally asks to text me a code, I should choose the option labelled "I'm installing an eSIM". Throughout the many login attempts on my PC, this never appeared. "Oh, let's try doing a forgotten password reset on the account", still nothing. In the end, I had to use Chrome on my new phone and finally the option appeared. As all kinds of things had happened with my account during this time to try and get the option to appear, I thought today that I should double-check that all is well with my account on their website.

Today the option appeared during the login process on my computer, despite me never seeing this option before on desktop and needing that option to appear during the migration 🙂

 

[mikeymikec]

I've found what I think is a bug in how Android 15 deals with dual-SIM:

Despite the fact that the eSIM was the first SIM I introduced to this phone (and only when it was fully activated did I install a pSIM), Android regards the pSIM to be the 'default SIM' in at least one way: In Settings > Sounds, I set the pSIM ringtone to be X and the eSIM ringtone to be Y, but when I add a contact and tell the contacts app to use the eSIM for this contact, it leaves the ringtone on what it appears to consider to be the 'default' (ie. pSIM ringtone).

Luckily I have a lot more work contacts on my phone than personal contacts, so I then marked both ringtones in Settings > Sound to be the same, and manually marked personal contacts to use my desired 'personal ringtone'. That way, as 99% of the contacts I add to my phone are work-related, they'll have the correct ringtone by default and I'll have less to remember to do going forward when adding contact info.