How to use Dual SIM on an iPhone - 2021

hey it's jared with state of tech today we're going to talk about how you use dual sim on an iphone now a few years ago when apple announced dual sim was going to be possible on an iphone i was excited i immediately set it up because i always had two lines one for personal and one for my business and there's has i've used dual sim phones in the past but you know the experience was always maybe questionable depending on the device there were issues sometimes um and then that was mostly android phones that had that capability and a lot of times i am switching back and forth between android and iphone but primarily i carry an iphone so i made a video a few years ago talking about dual sim and so in this video i want to talk about how to use it but i also want to talk about having several years of experience with dual sim on the iphone and what that looks like so i have the iphone 12 pro max right here of course it's a dual sim phone the last few years of uh iphones have been dual sim capable and so what that means is that you can have two phone lines coming to the phone and receive calls and make texts from two different phone numbers uh almost at the same time i mean you can't make phone calls from uh the same from two different numbers at the same time but you can make a call from one number and then make your next call from another number um so i wanted to talk a little bit about what that experience is like and then we'll talk about uh how to set that up and what that looks like based on the carrier that you're going with and uh just some things to to look out for i've definitely had to figure out some things over the last couple years as i've switched from different phones and even switched between different carriers for uh dual sim on my phone so this is the iphone 12 pro max when the iphone 13 comes out which is actually coming out today which probably in a couple weeks will become available i'll switch both of my dual sims over to that phone um and that process involves having two different lines and they don't even have to be with the same carrier now when i first started using dual sim i had a t and t and then i also had google five for another line and google phi essentially is very similar to t-mobile they use the same towers and all that good stuff but google phi is from google and it's pretty easy to set up and pretty inexpensive which is why i went with it now dual sim means that you can have two lines coming to your phone it also means that you can have two different data accounts coming to your phone so if you utilize a lot of data that might also be a good use case for having dual sim these days we have unlimited data but unlimited data becomes throttled when you go over a certain amount of data so if you had a second line on your phone you could switch over to that other line as far as it being your primary data line and then that line would start to utilize data and you'd have on throttle data until you ran that line out of its unlimited data and hit the cap so uh let's talk about why you would want dual sim well uh if you're like me you have a primary line that's your personal line and you have a business line or some other line and you you don't want to carry around two phones that was something that i had to do for the longest time was carry around two phones while i i sometimes still do that because i test out a lot of devices on this channel it's nice to have one phone that has both of those lines coming to it all of the contacts and everything else right in the phone so with dual sim that makes it pretty easy but you do have to have two different lines so i utilize two different carriers but you don't have to do that you can utilize the same carrier at t t-mobile verizon and uh well anything that t-mobile has swallowed up such as sprint they all support dual sim on this phone so if you go and get a second line all you'll have to tell them is that you need an e-sim for that second line now the little uh card slot the sim card slot on your phone still only supports one physical sim which means you put a physical sim in and then you put a another sim uh in via a digital format now that's where it gets a little tricky the carriers uh have a hard time giving out the information for you to manually enter in uh that information they want you to scan the little qr code that comes on essentially the same little business card sized sim card um that they would give you otherwise and you scan that in and that's been the tricky process for me anytime that i move to a different phone i typically have to go into a carrier store so that i can have them give me a new business card essentially like a business card with a qr code on it for me to scan so that i could bring that second line over to my new phone it hasn't always been that easy the physical sim has always been pretty easy you could just simply take that sim card out put it in your other phone and the carriers tend to update that automatically you almost don't even have to call them or anything you just take your sim card out put it in the other phone but with the digital sim you do often have to go in i have had them offer to ship me one but then they have to activate it to that and then ship it to you and however long it takes for that card to get to me my number is going to be attached to that sim card that i don't have access to or that esem that i don't have access to and my line could be active and people could be trying to call it for a few days while i wait to get that in so there are ways around going into the store they will send you the card in the mail it just takes time so is there any benefit to utilizing a different carrier than your main line so for me like i said i have verizon and i also have google phi the only real reason that i do that is because my secondary line i don't use for data i just want it for calls and texts and so i don't need to spend a bunch of money 40 50 whatever dollars on another line that has unlimited data i could just use google fi and get an inexpensive line for 15 or 20 bucks that will go on my phone and i don't have to have any data now i can use data on that line the way that google fi works on that plan is that they charge you for the data that you use and if you don't use any data then they don't charge you since i don't have data switching turned on in the phone and the phone settings i never use any data so i never pay more than whatever that is 15 or 20 bucks it's it's 15 dollars because i have a few other lines on google fi but if you only have one line on google phi i believe it's 20 and google phi does have other plans out now that include unlimited just like all the other carriers do but their pricing isn't nearly as good if you go that that route so for me i've chosen verizon as my main line because verizon provides the best coverage where i'm at up here in northwestern montana when i lived in california i would i was fine on a t i never felt a need to switch over to verizon and when i did switch over to verizon before moving up here i didn't really notice any difference i think i liked at t better for that area where i lived at the time but google phi being t-mobile gets you any coverage that you would have t-mobile uh anywhere else and so for me that works out because i don't need the second line to be as strong as the first line if i'm going you know out into the wilderness or whatever or driving outside of town where there might be gaps between coverage between the town that i was in and the next town over i don't mind my second line dipping out i'm still going to have coverage on my first line i'm still going to have data but my second line just becomes inaccessible and there even has been times where verizon has been unaccessible and i've had coverage on the on the google file line essentially t-mobile and there are settings in your phone that you can switch over your data between the two so if your main went out and then all of a sudden you didn't have any data you can switch over to your backup so we're going to dive in and look at the settings so that you can kind of see how this works i'm going to record my screen here and then you can see the settings that i have that are accessible on our phones to change so you can go into settings i'm just going to type in settings and there is a cellular tab right here now you'll see that i have primary and business those are the two different lines and you can label them accordingly so that way when you get a phone call it says you know p for primary b for business or the first letter of whatever it is that um you set these as you can see up at the top that i have my cellular data set on primary that means that my primary line which is my verizon line is the line in which the phone is going to use for data but i can also switch this to business or switch this to the other line and i can also allow cellular data switching as well now this basically means that if you are using data and then you get out of range on one line it's going to switch over to the other line um i do believe that it will prioritize one but as you can see here with the little description below coverage and availability is what is the deciding factor there you can also turn on and off your um your personal hotspot just like you can in the normal setting you set your default voice line essentially what default voice line means is that when you go to the phone app which line is it going to choose first so primary i usually use my phone for making personal calls more so than business calls and so default voice line to primary now under cellular plans under primary here's where i could choose my label and so it has a several built-in labels that you can choose from and then i could type in a custom label i can turn this line on or off so for example my secondary line if i want to turn it off on the weekends and not have access to it at all i could simply toggle that line off so if you do utilize the second line for maybe being on call or something like that or it's for work and you don't want any calls to come through over the weekend you could simply turn that line off which is nice you just have to remember to turn it back on you can see here my number i can turn on and off wi-fi calling calls on other devices is that feature on an iphone that allows you to accept calls on your mac uh macbook pro mac laptop whatever and your ipad and then some of these other settings are going to come in by default like voice and data 5g auto data mode allow more data on 5g roaming carrier services and sim pin and all that stuff so let's go down to the secondary line now the secondary line all these settings look pretty much the same uh google phi up here is lte there's no 5g anywhere around so voice and data are going to be lte you can see that the network selection is google phi and everything looks pretty much the same you can see there's also a low data mode as well which helps reduce cellular data usage and so if i didn't want to use much data on this line and i was using that cell data switching i can enable this one so that google phi would utilize less data and wouldn't because i'm paying for data as i use the data so this might be a good option if i had that turned on so down below you can see the cellular data for the primary line this is all normal stuff it can show you what apps are available to utilize data so that's nothing different down below but these settings here are what enable you to utilize your dual sim functionality if you wanted to set this up you can see here i have two set up but add cellular plan shows up below this would show up for you on your phone being that you only have a single line right now you'd hit add cellular plan and then your phone would pop up looking for that qr code uh that you would scan and that qr code would be on the little card that you would get from your carrier whether it be in-store or uh if they send it to you in the mail so it's pretty easy to set up and manage dual sim on the iphone now we're going to take a look at how it looks to utilize dual sim on an iphone so you can see up at the top right hand corner that i have bars that are split the top level of bars is going to be for my primary and the bottom level is going to be for my secondary line if i swipe over from the side you can see that i have a verizon and google phi and i can see the level of service that i have with each if i go into my phone app and go to the keypad you can see that i have a primary and a business tag up top and so depending on what line i want to make the call with i just simply choose use primary or use business and the phone is going to utilize that line to make the phone call alternatively when i receive a call it's also going to tell me whether or not that call is coming in on primary or business when you're looking at a contact you can also see right underneath it whether it was last used usually utilizing the business line or the primary line and so the phone even reminds you which line you primarily use for communicating with this person when you send a new text message to someone and you type in their number you can choose whether or not to send that text message with primary or the secondary line and so you just simply tap there and then when you go in and send your message that text message will be sent uh through primary or secondary depending on the line that you choose now if you are on an iphone both lines will be able to utilize imessage i typed in a fake number here which of course apple can't recognize as an imessage line and so it basically just uh you know goes green but you should be able to utilize imessage on both lines if you're text messaging someone who's also on an iphone if you're trying to message someone and it won't show up as an imessage you know the other person has an iphone and so do you then you need to go into your messages app here and make sure that send and receive is set to both of those phone numbers that are on your phone send and receive an imessage has to be turned on for both lines to be enabled to use imessage if one is turned on and one is not turned on then when you use the one that's not turned on your phone is going to default to standard text messaging and you're going to get the green bubbles if you want people to be able to facetime you on both lines you also have to go into the facetime settings and enable face time for both of those lines by default it may or may not enable so these are things that you're definitely going to want to check out to make sure that you're able to send imessage using both lines and if you want to be able to be face timed on both lines have facetime enabled as well so dual sim is a really great feature on the iphone and it makes it really nice because now we don't have to carry around separate phones you can have two lines on your phone for relatively inexpensive if you're like me utilize a main carrier that has the best coverage in your area that that provides you the data package that you need and then get an inexpensive line if you can't get an inexpensive line as that secondary line from the carrier the same carrier then go with a different carrier like i did such as google phi where you can get an inexpensive line i've got a link down in the description below where you can sign up for google phi and uh and give it a try i think they've got um a a free week or something like that or they've got promos going on all the time so it makes it really easy to set that up what you do have to do for google phy is use the sim card for google phy and then use the e sim for your main line so that's the tricky part google phi doesn't support the esim and so i actually have a google fi sim card in this phone and then i have verizon as the esim and i set the e sim as primary and i set the google fi which is the sim card as secondary so you can still go in and set these things and move them around as you need them to work for your phone so that's one of the things that i really like about the iphone is having that flexibility that's something that i haven't been able to find on other android phones especially samsung phones which here in the us have promised dual sim but definitely don't have dual sim and i've confirmed that with many people including the carriers so if you have any questions about this this can be kind of tricky how you want to set this up how you want to utilize it definitely ask down in the comment section below i'll do my best to answer your questions and uh yeah subscribe to the channel because i'm always trying to put out useful content like this to help people with different things that i've had to deal with myself and so if you want more videos like this click subscribe and i hope to see you back in another video soon here on state of tech take care

Channel: Jerad Hill Tech

Views: 297,690

Keywords: dual sim iphone, how to use dual sim in iphone, how to use dual sim in iphone 12, how to use dual sim in iphone 11, how dual sim works on the iphone, how to add a second phone line to my iphone, dual sim iphone 12, dual sim iphone 12 pro, how to use two different carriers on an iphone, verizon dual sim iphone, t-mobile dual sim iphone, at&t dual sim iphone, iphone tech tips

Id: 0utTIMFChB0

Length: 17min 46sec (1066 seconds)

Published: Fri Sep 17 2021