LG dishes up dual SIM on Gingerbread

MANILA, Philippines - During the last garage sale my family held before the holidays, one customer eyeing a basic touch-screen phone decided to discuss its merits with his girlfriend on speaker phone. They went back and forth regarding the screen and memory size, camera quality, Wi-Fi capability, the bargain price and other minute details until the woman asked something that floored the guy.

“Dual SIM ba ‘yan? (Is it dual SIM)?” she asked, sounding very dismissive.

“Honey, it’s P3,000!” the guy answered in a tone of disbelief.

The mobile phone in question didn’t support dual SIM, but the woman’s inquiry made it obvious that the market is warming up to the idea of having two SIMs for different service providers in one device. It suggests convenience and cost savings, and who doesn’t want that?

Dual-SIM phones are not exactly new. It’s been done before — albeit in a clunky and cumbersome way that belied the notion that two is better than one. But now that it’s been tweaked and re-launched by leaders in the field, dual SIM may just be the latest thing to make a woman say “Yes” — to a new phone that is.

So it was with unbounded curiosity that I agreed to fiddle with the new LG Optimus P698, a smartphone that cradles two SIMs inside it. I found it was very easy to switch between SIMs, which I think is the most important aspect to help users decide whether they like a dual-SIM phone or not. Bear in mind that to use one SIM means you have to deactivate the other, opening the possibilities of missed calls or even texts to that SIM. It’s one trade-off I see, but in terms of value this two-in-one SIM phone will sure attract many buyers.

For its core features, the LG Optimus P698 comes in an 11.7-mm sleek form factor made up basically of a 3.2-inch TFT, HVGA full touch screen, a 1500mAh battery and an 800MHz CPU and 512MB of RAM. I wish I could say it comes in different colors, but most smartphones are black and the P698 is no exception.

Running on the Google Android v2.3 (Gingerbread) platform, the LG Optimus P698 is a good device to help users amass apps from the existing 130,000 plus applications available at the Android market. Like the older Optimus One P500, the P698 handles apps well and by that I mean acceptably fast, especially now that it’s been fitted with a faster processor. I’m sorry to see, however, that like its predecessor, the P698’s boot-up time seems to be tiresomely slow. I’m known to be an impatient person, but I really dread doing a fresh boot-up with my LG phone because it feels like time would stand still during the process and I’ll be older by the time it’s finished booting.

Having said that, I like how LG Optimus smartphones come across as no-nonsense devices that get the job done without being flashy and insanely expensive. For P8,990, the LG Optimus P698 already comes with a 3-megapixel camera with 4x digital zoom and geo-tagging technology. The phone is equipped with a 150MB internal memory and a microSD slot for cards up to 32GB to give users more room to store their personal media files.

The woman virtually present at the garage sale would be pleased to know that the P698 can serve as a music phone, an FM radio, an Internet device with support for Wi-Fi as well as Wi-Fi Direct, an SNS (social network sites) hub with a ready widget for it, and a gaming device. LG also threw in nice-to-have apps such as an accelerometer, digital compass, A-GPS integrated with Google maps, document viewer and pushmail. And, again, it’s a dual-SIM phone, something that’s not very common yet among Android mobile phones and other platform types.