Some time ago I wrote about the travails I had getting a replacement phone at the tail end of the pandemic before things began to become normal (well, normalish).
I still have that phone, and I really don’t have a reason to upgrade it - it works well enough and we still don’t have a rural 5G service, so having a 4G only phone isn’t a big problem.
All good, but I’m going overseas later this year, and let’s just say that Telstra’s international roaming options are, well, pricy.
I’m going to Europe and the UK, with stopovers both ways, which makes the whole business messy.
It doesn’t have to be this way.
When I’ve been to Sri Lanka or Malaysia, the solution was simple, just take a second phone, either your old phone or one bought cheaply from one of the big box stores, and buy a sim from one of the airport phone shops.
In Sri Lanka, it was incredibly easy, Dialog, one of the big networks there, allowed you to pre-order your SIM, and do your security verification online. In Malaysia, you had to show your passport, but basically the phone shop people just took your money and gave you a SIM that was good for 30 days - absolutely essential for getting rideshare cars to and from hotels and restaurants.
Europe, well, Europe has always been messy with lots of different countries and phone companies. For a long time Jersey Telecom used to sell you a cheap deal allowing you to roam seamlessly across Europe. What’s more it never expired as long as you sent a text from your phone once a month, meaning that you could keep your number between trips.
Well they canned that deal during the pandemic, meaning it’s either back to Telstra’s pricy roaming or SIM swapping.
SIM swapping’s probably the most effective solution, but I didn’t want to swap the SIM out of my day to day phone, because banks do have a habit of sending you verification codes for transactions by text. As Telstra let you use wifi calling from overseas this shouldn’t be a problem, all I would need would be to ensure I was connected to a decent local wifi network when doing something that might need a verification code.
But that’s not going to solve the problem of needing a phone overseas.
And that’s a problem in two parts - firstly I don’t have a decent spare phone anymore. Any old phone I have is years out of date as I traded in my old iPhone a couple of years ago meaning that my old Samsung Galaxy I found in a drawer is getting on for seven years old - hilariously out of date and definitely due for a one way trip to the recycler.
The obvious solution was to buy one. Hunting around, I found I could get a 5G capable dual SIM phone from Oppo for a tad over $400, or a single SIM Google Pixel6a for a little under $500. (Other cheaper and slower options are available but I was looking for a reasonably well specified device.)
I’ll be honest. My first thought was OPPO???
But doing some checking the phones seem to be well made and have a decent enough reputation - yes there are always scare reviews about how they’re the spawn of the devil, but they’re outnumbered by decent, sensible, positive reviews.
Even so, if I’d been buying it for use at home I’d have gone for the Pixel, but the dual SIM option was attractive as Belong, Telstra’s low cost operation, does a cheap roaming option that covered the UK, France and Singapore, but not Italy, which is a bit of a pain, as I’m spending 10 or so days there.
However, if I had a dual SIM phone, I could use Belong’s roaming in Singapore and the UK, giving me time to sort out a suitable SIM for the rest of Europe while I’m there - basically one with enough data to use comfortably with Google Maps.
Buying a second phone in advance also means that I can set it up in advance, stripping out the irrelevant and adding in the extra apps required.
I’ve never had an Oppo phone, or indeed a dual SIM phone, but they have decent reviews, and who knows, it might end up replacing one or other of our phones in time ...
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