The Lumia 630 is the first Windows Phone 8.1 device to go on sale in select markets this week and is also the first Dual SIM Windows Phone. The ability to use two SIM cards in one device has been a much requested feature amongst potential Windows Phone customers in certain markets like India.
Microsoft claims that the Smart Dual SIM implementation in Lumia 630 offers seamless switching to help people manage their contacts and communication with ease. While we’ll bring a comprehensive review of Lumia 630 here on Windows Phone Central soon, let’s have a walkthrough of the dual SIM experience on the device.
Personalize
The color coding of the two SIM cards keeps calls, contacts and calendars separate so that it is easy to juggle between the two. The Start screen has separate phone and messaging tiles marked 1 and 2 that also notes the service providers’ name. You can also link the individual phone and/or messaging tiles into one unified tile.
You can personalize these names as well for an easy recall, such as ‘work’ and ‘personal’, ‘home’ and ‘roaming’, ‘wife’ and ‘girlfriend’ (not recommended) to avoiding any confusion between call and messaging history of the two.
While data is defaulted to use one SIM at a time, you can go into settings and configure which SIM you'd like to default for data use at any time.
Easy Switch
For a contact, your messaging thread appears integrated and switching to the other SIM is very easy without running a parallel thread or changing settings. All you need to do is toggle between the two SIMs through the button on the top, and continue the conversation without breaking a beat.
Similarly, for each individual contact and further for each individual number, you can set a default SIM to make calls to that particular number. Of course, you would always want to call your boss from your work number and the girlfriend from your personal number. Again, using the toggle button you can easily change it within the contact's profile details.
Smart Dual SIM
The Smart Dual SIM feature has been built by Nokia on top of Windows Phone 8.1’s support for two SIM cards. The feature ensures that a user is always reachable on both SIMs and calls are forwarded to the available SIM of the intended SIM is unavailable.
As soon as you insert the second SIM, an Action Center notification informs you to configure the Smart Dual SIM settings. When you proceed to configure the Call settings, you get four options for the Smart Dual SIM feature.
- You can keep the setting off, and if one of your SIM is unreachable, the caller on that number would be informed of the same like in a single SIM phone.
- You can configure the option between SIM cards in which case when either of your SIM would be unavailable the call would be seamlessly forwarded to your other SIM and neither you nor the caller would have to bother about broken communication.
- You can also configure the forwarding from SIM 1 to SIM 2 or the other way around unidirectional. This is helpful for example when you are travelling internationally, and you want the calls to your home SIM to be forwarded to your local SIM, but not vice-versa.
Of course, call forwarding would incur the operator charges, but it’s a very useful and well-executed feature.
Dual SIM phones allow consumers to have two phone numbers on a single device and are quite popular in certain markets. The Lumia 630 packs in the functionality with an intuitive user experience that should help the platform win a lot of customers.
Would you prefer to pick a dual SIM or a single SIM variant of the Lumia 630?
