In message , at 11:11:38 on Sun, 14 Jul
2019, tim... remarked:

Then there's a few phones which need a "5v" SIM, and don't work with
a 3v one. Those SIMs are getting harder to find (some say that it's
only Pound-shop Orange SIMs these days,

Thinks

why would someone pay even as much as a pound for a SIM?

Because that's what the shops charge, and stealing them is a crime.

I've paid as little as 1P for a SIM in Tesco, and both I and the
checkout assistant were surprised (the shelf was marked 99p)

But they've been trained to believe what the till tells them.

That came with some free data for the first month, so not merely a bit
of plastic needing topping up.

Sainsbury's Mobile used to have some offers (their project flopped and
they did desperate stuff to try to kick start it). One of which was to
give people who bought a phone there, a voucher for a £10 top-up. But
the till regarded a £10 SIM [with one month's credit pre-installed] as a
'phone', so they were effectively free.
--
Roland Perry

In message , at 09:55:16 on Sun, 14 Jul
2019, Recliner remarked:
Roland Perry wrote:
In message , at 08:21:37 on Sun, 14 Jul
2019, Recliner remarked:
Roland Perry wrote:
In message , at 12:29:56 on Sun, 14 Jul


One of the reasons for having a Virgin second-SIM is it authenticates
Virgin wifi (for those also not on Virgin Cable) on the phone.

https://www.virginmedia.com/help/vir...ect-to-london-
underground

I'm on Virgin Mobile, partly for that reason, and find that it generally
fails to connect to the LU hot spots. It's supposed to connect
automatically, but seldom does.

I think you need the Virgin "wifi-buddy" app running on the phone, but
it's a long time since I tried connecting.

Hoho, it's now called "Virgin Media Connect", and is one of those
Marmite apps with a predominance of 5* and 1* ratings. It's entirely
possible the 1* ratings are because of some fundamental incompatibility
issues, rather than fat-fingered users.

I do have the app, but it still doesn't work properly. I might not be using
it correctly, of course, but I'm sure it (or the predecessor app) did work.
I don't really have much need for it, as I'm not usually waiting long
enough in deep Tube stations to be able to use it. And I don't know of a
way of sending and receiving texts via station WiFi.

You'd need a phone and account which had "wifi calling", which might not
exist in a combination useful to you.

Needs Android 5, apparently, which is why it's not on my phone any more.

I'm on Android 9.

Oh, the irony; the reason I bought and am sticking with that phone
(dual-SIM) is the very reason I can't use the second SIM slot for this.

My Android 9 phone is dual sim.

Active, standby or hybrid? Maybe the Virgin trick doesn't work on a
standby basis, and all the hybrid I've seen today are also standby.

If I add in my requirement for a replaceable battery, 32GB, active
dual-SIM, I think that narrows the field to zero.

Accepting a hybrid dual-SIM doesn't help, unfortunately (with 32GB, I
probably wouldn't need an SD card).
--
Roland Perry

"Roland Perry" wrote in message
...
In message , at 11:11:38 on Sun, 14 Jul 2019,
tim... remarked:

Then there's a few phones which need a "5v" SIM, and don't work with a
3v one. Those SIMs are getting harder to find (some say that it's only
Pound-shop Orange SIMs these days,

Thinks

why would someone pay even as much as a pound for a SIM?

Because that's what the shops charge,

Is it. Higher than I have seen, 50p earlier this week (forget where)

and stealing them is a crime.

Yes, very funny


I've paid as little as 1P for a SIM in Tesco, and both I and the checkout
assistant were surprised (the shelf was marked 99p)

My last one was sent to me for free

But they've been trained to believe what the till tells them.

That came with some free data for the first month, so not merely a bit of
plastic needing topping up.

I think my free one came with some credit. AIH that was worthless to me as
I only need it to convert a full sized SIM into a nano SIM.

Sainsbury's Mobile used to have some offers (their project flopped and
they did desperate stuff to try to kick start it).

They didn't do anything differently to others trying to enter the market

their problem was they came to the market too late

tim

"Roland Perry" wrote in message
...
In message , at 11:09:30 on Sun, 14 Jul 2019,
tim... remarked:

I'm not sure how many phones ever took the full size SIM.

Commercial considerations killed them off: the idea was that a person
would have a SIM, and be able to share/borrow a phone to use it in.

But the networks wanted to tie people into having their own phone (and
contract) in particular not wanting a phone they'd subsidised being used
with a SIM from a rival network,

They solved that problem by having phones "network" locked

My "acquired" smart phone still is

Is still what. Locked? That's hardly unusual.

I know

but you seemed not to understand it as the solution to people "sharing"
phones by swapping SIMs in/out


--
Roland Perry

"Clank" wrote in message
...
"tim..." Wrote in message:
Engineers didn't like creating designs for these ever smaller SIMs. It
was a real PITA.
But it was what Marketing wanted

Nonsense! We wanted to create smaller, better, cooler handsets
just as much as "marketing" - and the ridiculous credit-card
sized SIM was a major barrier to that.

well yes

but I was referring to the move from standard to micro to nano SIMs

whereupon inserting the SIM was changed to require removing the
IIRC for the the phone that I had that took a full credit card size SIM
you still had to fit it in under the battery

Indeed, and this was always a feature rather than a bug - it meant
we could confidently design the software stack to assume the SIM
it booted up with would never change (for as long as it was
running.) This mattered when you were coding for a 68k
derivative with memory measured in peanuts, and every byte
counted...

I don't recall working on "terminals" where memory was measured in peanuts

we had enough of it.

The problem was it wasn't very developer "friendly".

we still worked with PROMs and had to physically reprogram them each time we
changed the code.

tim

In message , at 14:31:13 on Sun, 14 Jul
2019, tim... remarked:


"Roland Perry" wrote in message
...
In message , at 11:09:30 on Sun, 14 Jul
2019, tim... remarked:

I'm not sure how many phones ever took the full size SIM.

Commercial considerations killed them off: the idea was that a
person would have a SIM, and be able to share/borrow a phone to use


But the networks wanted to tie people into having their own phone
(and contract) in particular not wanting a phone they'd subsidised
being used with a SIM from a rival network,

They solved that problem by having phones "network" locked

My "acquired" smart phone still is

Is still what. Locked? That's hardly unusual.

I know

but you seemed not to understand it as the solution to people "sharing"
phones by swapping SIMs in/out

Do keep up: "[Opportunities open up] Even on a locked phone because
(for example) GiffGaff and Tesco both use O2, and Virgin/Orange/T-Mobile
all share EE."
--
Roland Perry

In message , at 15:03:06 on Sun, 14 Jul
2019, tim... remarked:

Nonsense! We wanted to create smaller, better, cooler handsets
just as much as "marketing" - and the ridiculous credit-card
sized SIM was a major barrier to that.

well yes

but I was referring to the move from standard to micro to nano SIMs

I wondered if you were, despite you replying in a subthread about the
CC-sized SIMs.

we still worked with PROMs and had to physically reprogram them each
time we changed the code.

Wow! Even back in the mid 80's we'd advanced to electrically
re-programming them, where I worked. Cutting those little links on the
PROM chip must have been really hard work for you.

In case you think I'm being facetious, I have seen ULA chips where a
small amount of [re]programming was done with a micro-scalpel.
--
Roland Perry

"tim..." Wrote in message:
Engineers didn't like creating designs for these ever smaller SIMs. It was a real PITA.
But it was what Marketing wanted

Nonsense! We wanted to create smaller, better, cooler handsets
just as much as "marketing" - and the ridiculous credit-card
sized SIM was a major barrier to that.

whereupon inserting the SIM was changed to require removing the
IIRC for the the phone that I had that took a full credit card size SIM you still had to fit it in under the battery

Indeed, and this was always a feature rather than a bug - it meant
we could confidently design the software stack to assume the SIM
it booted up with would never change (for as long as it was
running.) This mattered when you were coding for a 68k
derivative with memory measured in peanuts, and every byte
counted...

--

"tim..." Wrote in message:
counted...I don't recall working on "terminals" where memory was measured in peanuts
we had enough of it.

Ahh, POCSAG+ and 8051 microcontrollers with 256 bytes of RAM, how
I miss thee; and yes, while the GSM days were better - much less
incredibly ugly reusing-the-same-buffer-a-dozen
-times-in-different-places, we even had something approximating
malloc/free - wasting good memory on being able to handle a
completely unnecessary feature like changing SIM with the power
on would mean memory not going on something useful. I wrote the
first WAP/WML browser outside the original Unwired Planet
reference implementation (it was still called HDML at the time,
in fact), and fighting against memory constraints was a constant
battle...

The problem was it wasn't very developer "friendly".
we still worked with PROMs and had to physically reprogram them each time we changed the code.

We could at least afford EEPROMs and In-Circuit Emulators. But
they were horrendously unreliable pieces of kit (not least the
flimsy ribbon cables that connected the ICE to where the chip
would have been) that stopped working if someone in the next room
sneezed, so one of my first gigs was building a test framework
that massively improved development productivity. I didn't
emulate the CPU, so native assembly couldn't be tested in it -
fortunately there wasn't much of that about even then - but built
a set of libraries that would allow the entire phone to be
recompiled and run on a Sun Sparc workstation, with all the
hardware devices simulated by mocks. As I recall - and it is
25-odd years ago - I had fun getting even the DMA-accessed
peripherals to emulate right, with no code changes to the phone
source, even if it was bit-banging them - using Sys-V shared
memory segments... (Interrupts were emulated using Unix
signals...)

Writing the mock instances of things like the LCD controller chip
(which I rendered to the workstation screen using X) bug-for-bug
compatible with the hardware ones was genuinely great
fun...

Gloriously happy days.


--

"Roland Perry" wrote in message
...
In message , at 15:03:06 on Sun, 14 Jul 2019,
tim... remarked:

Nonsense! We wanted to create smaller, better, cooler handsets
just as much as "marketing" - and the ridiculous credit-card
sized SIM was a major barrier to that.

well yes

but I was referring to the move from standard to micro to nano SIMs

I wondered if you were, despite you replying in a subthread about the
CC-sized SIMs.

we still worked with PROMs and had to physically reprogram them each time
we changed the code.

Wow! Even back in the mid 80's we'd advanced to electrically
re-programming them, where I worked. Cutting those little links on the
PROM chip must have been really hard work for you.

you know that I didn't mean that

I meant that we had to take them off the board to reprogram them

none of this downloading into in situ flash, lark



tim