Monday, March 05, 2007

Phone Dilemma

I'm sure that I can't be the only person who carries two phones about with me. For over 10 years I have had a work phone and a personal phone. My cute personal phone (a Samsung SGH-E330) stays with me almost always hanging rather attractively from my belt. Despite what some fashion fascist may think this is a highly convenient and efficient and in no way geeky! My more business like work phone (a Nokia 6230) normally lives in my suit jacket pocket and I only have it with me during work hours or when I need be be contactable. So I always know depending on which phone rings whether it is a work call or a personal call. This has worked very well for me but the time has come to examine my options, There are several reasons:

a) The UK Law has just changed to make using a mobile phone whist driving a serious offence garnering 3 penalty points and a big fine. So I will have to get a car kit fitted to the motor to prevent temptation and this would only be for one of the phones since no kit could fit them both.

b) I want to use blue tooth to access traffic information on my TomTom satnav and that would be more convenient with just one phone
c) Synching my contacts with 2 phones is a pain in the derriere. It just doesn't work very well.,
d) I want to be able to move to new gadgets like the Blackberry Pearl or better still the Apple iPhone.
e) It's bonkers having two devices that do precisely the same job.

So I am really curious how other people have dealt with this dilemma. Have they, as I have, just put up with having two phones? Or have you forwarded one to the other (surely too expensive?), Bought identical interchangable phones? Used a dual SIM phone (and if so does this work when the two SIMs are on different networks?), given up and used a work phone for personal use as well (tax implications)?

Anything else I haven't thought of?

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

Since my Nokia 6310i started to become unreliable, I ordered a new one through work. I got a 6021 (just had to take the back off to find that out, isn't it great!)
Now I have a car kit for the 6310i in my car, so I was miffed when the 6310i started playing up and becomng unreliable (the usual - it'd reboot itself, hang with no signal, etc. My mate who writes some of the software for it says it's quite common!) Anyway, I digress...
In a nutshell, new phone arrives and it doesn't fit in the car kit, so end up taking 2 with me. Can I be bothered swapping SIM's? No. So the 6310i is the one I use when I travel. Having realised that the problem with the 6310i is much worse when it's not in the car kit, I use that one and use the 6021 (with my Vodafone GPRS/3G SIM) to receive traffic.

Simple, eh?

To confuse it all, I then go nd get myself a nice Sony Ericsson K750i as a personal phone. When I'm not driving, I sometimes switch the work SIM over to this one, as I like the phone better than all the rest.

When I'm heading off on a journey for work in the car and I need the TomTom Traffic information, it's a right SIM-Swap-a-thon before I leave the door.

I guess I haven't answered your question, but at least you know you're not alone. We need one of these:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AIOqOxI0K_I

Ring me and I'll tell you all about it.. depending on which phone I'm on :)

ian said...

Orange (and possibly other operators) do a thing where you can have two numbers assigned to a single phone.

Orange Line 2

And I expect that assigning different ringtones to the different numbers is possible.

Anonymous said...

Try just using a landline-or writing letters!It's much simpler-or does it just mean I don't have any friends?
Sue

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