Beyond the Alphabet
Beyond the Alphabet is a weekly column that focuses on the tech world both inside and outside the confines of Mountain View.
For as long as I can remember, I’ve almost never left the house without having (at least) two phones on me. Part of that is just the nature of the beast when you write about smartphones for a living. However, I was dual-carrying phones long before I began writing full-time.
Occasionally, I would stick to just one phone, leaving the other behind, whether it was for a special occasion or just a quick trip to the store. However, after Apple had the “courage” to drop the SIM card tray, the days of popping out the SIM from one phone and using it in another have long been gone. And given the headaches that accompany trying to get my carrier to transfer an eSIM from one phone to another, I wasn’t sure if I would ever return to being “normal.”
All that changed after my 15-month-old son decided that he was going to take an opportunity to try out for the Orioles. One moment, I’m walking down the hallway with him in one arm and my iPhone in the other, to turn off the lights in his room. The next thing I know, my phone was a good ten feet away from me, face down, with my son nuzzling his head into my shoulder.
Just like that, I was making an appointment at Best Buy to put my AppleCare Plus subscription to use. The first hiccup was that I needed to leave my phone there overnight, which also meant that I couldn’t approve any of the 2FA requests needed to access my Verizon account from another device. It didn’t seem like that big of a deal, as the Verizon store was in the next shopping center.
Almost two hours later, I was finally able to leave Verizon with my phone number activated on the Galaxy Z Fold 6. In that time, the sales rep tried everything they could to get my eSIM transferred from the iPhone to the Fold 6. At one point, they even got their manager involved, only to come away empty-handed. It turns out that the only thing that worked was activating and inserting a physical SIM card.
Since then, I’ve been daily carrying just the Fold 6, and it’s actually been a bit liberating. For one, my pockets are lighter, as I’m no longer carrying around an extra pound (literally 1.027 pounds). But there’s also just something nice about not needing to worry about where I might have put one of my phones, or trying to decide which phone I should use to accomplish a certain task.
And while I do occasionally miss using my iPhone, it’s been almost a month since “the incident,” and I haven’t felt the urge to actually go through another potential ordeal. I quite enjoy the idea of being able to just pop my SIM card out of the Fold 6 and into the Pixel 9 Pro Fold. There’s no need to log into my Verizon account, get on the phone with customer service, or head into a local store. Whenever I’m ready to, it’ll take maybe 5 minutes, and I’ll be on my merry way.
I wish I could sit here and tell you what kind of problems prevented the eSIM from being activated on the Fold 6, but neither the Verizon rep nor their manager could figure it out. For all I know, it could have just been a random glitch that happened to occur at the right moment. Maybe it’s the universe’s way of telling me that I don’t need an iPhone *he said, tongue in cheek.*
What’s weird is that I haven’t run into these kinds of problems when moving eSIMs from carriers like Mint Mobile or Visible to other devices. Instead, I only ever deal with issues when it comes to the Verizon eSIM housing my personal mobile number. This leads me to believe it’s something on Verizon’s end, which also wouldn’t come as a shock given how difficult carriers have made it to switch devices.
No matter what the reason is, it doesn’t really matter at the end of the day. This isn’t a “redemption story” for eSIM, but instead just further proves that it’s not as perfect a solution as we’d be led to believe. It’s not like I was trying to activate an eSIM on the first phone to include support for the technology; it’s a phone that not only costs an arm and a leg, but is also not even a year old yet.
While we regularly see many of the best Android phones follow in Apple’s footsteps, this is one area that I’m thankful they haven’t. And frankly, I hope the day of an eSIM-only Android phone never comes.
