Multiple SIMs in one phone: a disruptive idea from Nokia’s research

This week the Washington Post celebrated the watershed of 3.3 billion mobile phones active on a planet of 6.6 billion people. In retrospect it seems unremarkable (a no-brainer, as Mo Ibrahim puts it) that mobile phones have penetrated the developing world as rapidly as they have, possibly outstripping the impact of computers (mobile networks are now being used to support computer-based internet access in areas where there is no conventional computer link to the net).

Over the past four or five years Nokia has been carrying out research to understand consumers’ needs in these important emerging markets. Some of this research (carried out in shanty towns in Mumbai, Rio and Accra) was reported by Younghee Jung at the 2008 Lift conference. Recognising the limits of observational research in communities with which the researchers lack familiarity and where language is a barrier, Nokia augmented standard observational techniques with competitions for local people to express what they wanted their phones to do for them. It’s good to see innovative research approaches and this particular idea seems to have generated a rich response from community members.

Most of the research participants’ ideas had a strong practical orientation. The request for genuinely rugged phones that survive local conditions over a number of years struck a chord with me: I have heard similar from people working in manual trades in the UK (they also want a volume level that makes callers’ voices audible against the background noise of a building site).

Another idea that came out of the competition was a single phone that could hold up to four SIM cards, allowing the user to get the best out of a range of tariffs without swapping SIMs manually or carrying multiple phones. How sensible is that. It would be welcomed in the UK, too, particularly by 16-24s, many of whom juggle SIMs and handsets in order to get the most out of their mobile phone spend. A Google search reveals there is at least one phone (apparently aimed at business users) that can accept two SIMS, plus an N95 clone that can take three SIMs, and some third party hacks to bring two SIMs into one phone.

Handset manufacturers and operators haven’t exactly jumped at this opportunity so far. Operators are hardly likely to want to share customers with their competitors. They gain from people’s inefficient use of their tariffs (not using their full allowance or running over allowances and paying for additional use at a premium). This inefficiency might be reduced by easy swapping between SIMs and tariffs. And multi-SIM handsets would disrupt the prevailing model in the mobile industry: give the phone, sell the tariff (in his Wired article, ‘Freeconomics’, Chris Anderson has tracked this type of cross-subsidy back to Gillette’s tactic of giving away free razors to create a market for disposable blades).

I wonder whether Nokia are responding to the multiple SIM idea. No doubt they are constantly reviewing the relationship between phone handset and operator, and how their technology might develop to meet changes ahead. Disruptive companies like Blyk, where any unlocked, MMS-capable handset can be used to receive the service, are already signalling the possibility of change in the traditional relationship (advertising sponsors phone use, rather than phone use sponsoring the cost of the handset).

I’ve focused on this particular research snippet because it shows how users can come up with design ideas that have the potential for disruption. It’s common for people to claim that user research never generates any ideas that haven’t been thought of by industry already. In this case, the research hasn’t come up with anything that’s brand, spanking new, but it has shown an idea in a context where it has real meaning and where there is, surely, potential for development. The milestone of 3.3 billion phones has been achieved with restrictive handset/operator conventions (played out to an extreme in the launch of iPhone with just a single operator in each country). It will be interesting to see whether the traditional relationships will continue to hold into the future.

Entry Filed under: Counterculture In technology, Understanding users