It is very easy for us to change our phone service to a new one. You take the SIM card out of your old phone, pop it into your new phone, and boom! But we’re starting to see more and more phones, especially at the high end, forego the physical SIM card altogether in favor of eSIMS, basically a SIM chip that’s soldered directly onto your phone’s motherboard.
If you’re not sure exactly what a SIM card does, it contains a small amount of data that identifies you to whichever mobile network the card is meant to connect you to. This way, the mobile carrier knows that you have an active subscription and subsequently allows you access. Hence, you pay for a local SIM card when traveling internationally, as at that point you’re trying to connect to a different network than whatever you’re using at home.
Of course, with the fact that space inside the typical smartphone is at a premium these days, think about the well-publicized removal of the headphone jack. It isn’t surprising that phone manufacturers would want to get rid of the relatively large physical SIM slot and replace it with something much smaller.
A standard physical nano SIM card measures about 12 by 9 millimeters. But eSIMs start at 6x5mm and get even smaller from there. But how exactly do you change your carrier if you can’t swap out a physical SIM? There are several ways to do this. A carrier that supports eSIM can give you a QR code, making switching services a matter of just scanning the code and changing providers in your phone’s settings.
Other times, you can enter an activation code manually. And if you’re traveling abroad, there are apps you can download that allow you to pick the country you’re going to and then automatically provision an eSIM once you pay for it. To use built-in SIMs can create problems sometimes, and we’ll tell you what it is right .
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You know that thing we said a minute ago about carriers that support eSIM? Well, not every carrier does. Although many major carriers have started bringing in eSIM support, your options will often be limited when traveling abroad, at least for now. So if you want to shop for a better price or more data, as you often can when visiting the shop at your destination airport, you may end up being out of luck.
Not to mention that eSIMs tend to be more expensive than physical SIM cards. But regardless of the current headaches for some travelers, the future does seem to be heading towards phones without traditional SIM trays. And there’s even a new style of internal SIM we’ll see shortly called iSIM.
Where the I stands for integrated, in contrast to the iPhone, which stands for important. Instead of a separate chip soldered onto the motherboard, iSIM is part of the phone’s SoC or system on chip, the package where core components like the CPU, GPU, and modem live. An iSIM is not only much smaller than an eSIM; we’re talking less than one square millimeter.
Wow. But it can also save on battery life. Two advantages are extremely appealing to both phone manufacturers and consumers. At the time we wrote this video, there weren’t yet any phones that used an iSIM, but Qualcomm was already offering it as an option with their Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 chips. It has the same advantages as eSIM, but, like eSIM, it also requires carriers to get on board.
We’re confident that more of them will over the next few years, but we just hope that it won’t continue to limit options for you, the poor consumer. I guess it beats that sinking feeling you get when you’re about to fly home from vacation and you realize you dropped your original SIM card in a foreign toilet.
And thanks for dropping in for the whole post! Wow! Thank you.
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