How to use an eSIM on any phone with eSIM.me

okay so i have an esimi card here to try out it's a way of using esims on devices which only support traditional sims i'll explain what that means over the course of this video in the interest of transparency you should know that esendme sent me this card after i offered to make this video but i'm not in any way associated with them the reason i'm interested in it is because i want to use esims to travel because the rates are much better than traditional sim cards in the past i've bought travel sim cards online and put them in my phone when the plane lands but this time i was struggling to find affordable sim cards for my next destination which led me to discover aerolo and other companies providing much lower rates on travel sims but the catch is that most of them only provide e-sim cards not physical sim cards i was under the impression that i could just install the app from an esim provider and that the app would install the esim but it turns out that you actually need a piece of hardware in your phone called an eui cc chip if your phone doesn't have one you can't use esims my phone doesn't have one of these so i looked into upgrading it but there are actually only very few phones on the market now which support esims natively and none of them are enticing enough for me to justify replacing my current phone even when i do decide to upgrade it the way the market is right now i wouldn't be surprised if my next phone also doesn't support e sims so i searched online for a way to upgrade or convert phones to run esims and immediately found this very clever solution this is the isa me or maybe it said easton.me it's made by a german company called telco village what they've done is they've made an eui cc chip in the shape of a traditional sim card which can also interface with devices as the traditional sim card in other words it's both a sim card and an e-sim chip in one you put it in the sim slot of an android phone and use their app to install an esim onto it then you can either use it in that phone as it is or you can take it out and use it in anything else that can read a sim card when the app first opens it will tell you whether your phone will be able to program the esimi or not if you're thinking of buying one then download the app first to see if your device is supported the phone needs to be able to provide omapi and sim reader access to the app if your device is supported the app will tell you which sim slots are supported if your device is not supported make sure to check on any old devices you might have in a draw somewhere since the device is only used to set the e-sim card up and after which can be used on whatever device you like it doesn't matter if your primary device is not supported you can put it in the supported device set it up and then move it into the unsupported device where it will act like a traditional sim card my device a xiaomi k20 pro is supported but you can see that only slot 1 is supported so after breaking out the right size card for my tray i put it in slot 1 and reopened the app i found it took quite a long time to open after making an account and registering the card with it i was met with a very simple interface you can add esims by scanning a code choosing a picture saved to your device or pasting raw text i tried selecting a picture of a qr code which was emailed to me but it said it couldn't detect the code so i scanned the barcode from my computer you could also print out the code and scan it or use a second device to take a picture of the code and then scan it from that device's screen first i tried an easem from ubiki which threw an error message then i tried an easem from mogo and the app stage went blank with no apparent progress so i cleared the app data from the settings panel and was able to successfully add the mogo esim the process took a little bit of patience but i think anyone could do it to be fair the ubigis isim might have thrown a spanner in the works i emailed ubigi about the error and they told me that they do not currently support esimi but that they're working on it from this i learned that there needs to be a degree of cooperation from the ecm provider if you're interested in using aeroloe which seems to be the biggest player in the travel eastern market at the moment i have confirmed with the esimi team that it will work although i have yet to test it myself once it was set up a nice touch i wasn't expecting was that the apn from the service provider was added to the card i was able to open my apn settings and select it without having to look up and add anything manually as with the traditional sim card it took a while to connect for the first time after testing the connection i put the card in another phone i found that the sim was immediately detected and the apn data could be selected in the same way on that phone this really saves a lot of trouble i also tried it on a couple of wi-fi hotspots one of which connected immediately the other needed apn and roaming settings modified i think it's worth noting that the e-sim provider i had chosen needed to have international roaming enabled for it to work on some of my devices if you're struggling to connect then try enabling global roaming some of these providers are not in the country you'll be connecting from for anyone using custom android roms i attempted to set it up on a supported device running lineage os and micro g and the app hung its setup this might be because the custom rom doesn't provide om api and sim reader access or perhaps it has something to do with there being no google services if you don't know what a custom rom is then you don't need to worry about this if you do then take this into consideration so they have a few different options on their website before trying it out i wasn't exactly sure what the implications of choosing a cheaper version were but this is what i've learned from spending some time fiddling with the cards and reading through their website they've got four versions they call them single multi omni and dual it seems to me like duel is just two omnis at a discount as you go up the range you can have more e-sims installed on the card at any one time if the storage becomes full you can delete them and make space personally i can't see why you would need more than five but perhaps there are usage cases out there that i'm not aware of it's not like you can use more than one connection at a time you choose one profile to make active and the others stay dormant with the single version it can only be managed by one device you'll still be able to use it as a regular sim on other devices you'll just need to put it back into the original device to install or switch esims if that becomes too much of a bother you can pay to have the license transferred to a different device for ten dollars with the multi version you're confined to a brand rather than a specific phone this might be a good idea if you're a brand loyalist however at twenty dollars above the single version you'd have to change phones twice before you break even if you're bouncing back and forth between phones of the same manufacturer this might make sense again you can change the associated brand for ten dollars with the omni and dual versions you can change which device you're using to manage the card freely this next part is about management of the e-sim on dual sim devices if you have two sim slots you can use two esimi cards to connect to two separate service providers simultaneously in the case of the single and multi versions you'll need to physically take the cards out and swap them around when you want to manage them with omni and dual you can manage them without taking them out if you have two supported sim slots my phone has only one supported sim slot so i would have to swap them around anyway if i were planning to run a setup like that not that that's a big deal there are actually a few sub-versions here that allow you to have fewer profiles at a lower price you might be okay with fewer profiles in which case you could save a few bucks so think about how you're going to use it i'm planning on doing a separate video trying out a few different esim providers i'll add a link in the description when it's up along with a couple of other useful resources

Channel: Meerkat Tech

Views: 25,536

Keywords:

Id: CGQX651VEuY

Length: 8min 21sec (501 seconds)

Published: Thu Aug 25 2022