Why mobile companies are pushing for hybrid slot in dual SIM smartphones

A few years back, owning a dual-SIM mobile phone was considered a luxury–there were jokes cracked on people who owned two dual-SIM mobile phones: how could they manage so many contact numbers!

A couple of years back, almost everybody who owned a smartphone had a dual-SIM cell phone because almost all the companies started offering this feature as a standard one. Right from Micromax, Motorola, and Samsung etc.–all the newly launched sets had dual-SIM capability. RAM was low usually 1 GB and the processors were also slow. Cameras were also not that sharp. Batteries were not that bad. The SIM size, however, kept on decreasing from standard to micro and than to nano size.

Then started the push for real smartphones which would try to emulate or eventually replace various other gadgets including laptops (for certain people), and even digital cameras.

Amazing battery life coupled with great processor and RAM up to 8 GB is offered nowadays. People don’t consider a battery life good if it does not last the whole day.

However, in between this, a new slot emerged which which would fit both a SIM card (micro) or a memory card. This slot if called hybrid slot. You can use either two SIM cards or one SIM card and a memory card.

Now, why companies are pushing for hybrid card

In my opinion, if I have a phone which has decent features including 2 GB RAM, 5-inch screen size, up to 3,000 mAH battery life and a decent processor, I won’t go for a high-end phone. I own a Nikon D3100 and therefore don’t need a great rear camera in my phone. So, I opted to buy Lenovo P1M Vibe mobile phone. It costed me around 7K at that time. It supports 4G, is dual-SIM and also has a separate memory card slot. I use Idea, Reliance Jio and a 32 GB memory card. The internal memory of the phone is 16 GB.

Now, I wanted to buy a similar camera for my father. However, there is no recently launched camera in the market that has similar features. Either I buy a higher range camera where I spend around 10-13K or use one SIM only. Jio is offering free calls and data but I can’t use it with any phone whether it’s Mi, Lenovo, ASUS, or even Samsung. Either I compromise on memory or SIM.

The companies are pushing for hybrid SIM slot because they want to make customers accustomed to using phones with higher internal memory which comes at a high price rather than using an external memory card, which is rather cheap.

I know there are few minor other enhancements but smartphones around the range of 7-8K with 16 GB memory, 2GB RAM, decent processor and battery life, dual-SIM capacity with a separate memory slot are perfect fit for a mid-range user.

Sadly, I don’t see companies coming back to this design.