Asia | Bradley de Souza

Top-up card mis-selling on new networks in Asia

Sunday, 24th of August 2008 at 07:33:15 AM

I recently had cause to get some prepaid sims whilst on a trip to Asia. It made sense to have a local number in the countries where I was going to be spending more than a few days.

To that end I was advised by friends and colleagues to go out and get a sim from the latest network entrant offering super cheap calls/service. In Malaysia that happened to be U Mobile.

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Multi-sim, dual sim, i-SmartSim 2008

Saturday, 16th of August 2008 at 05:35:40 AM

Whilst on business in Malaysia and Singapore I was surprised to discover mobile operators offering a sim service long since extinct in Europe: Multi-sim.

Essentially multi-sim enables the user to use several sim cards all bearing the same phone number. This means you can have one sim in your main phone, another sim in a data product e.g. pda, gps, a sim in your weekend phone (maybe a slimmed down Nokia,) and/or even a sim in an emergency phone stored somewhere secure.

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Don’t get what you want but want what you get!?!

Friday, 8th of August 2008 at 05:16:31 AM

This is the message that the mobile phone industry has been pushing, mainly in European markets. Classic examples are Video calling, MMS, WAP and even Location based services (priced to death for the end-user.)

So why the Buddhist message, the ‘don’t worry be happy,’ ‘want what you get’ approach? The answer lies in the fact that customers often need a push to take up new technology and services. Without this so called ‘push’ we wouldn’t be using the Internet on the phone or taking/sending as many pictures.