Dual SIM phones are many people's preferred way of carrying two phone numbers at the same time, but the majority of phone designs have card trays that only allow either two SIM cards or one SIM and one microSD card. However, IDEMIA doesn't think you should be forced to choose between the two, and so it came up with FuZion.
FuZion is a microSD card that also has the SIM chip and connectors on the sides, allowing you to use it as a SIM card as well as a storage device. The device is designed to work with any phone that has a card tray that can take either microSD or SIM cards in the same slot. FuZion isn't a completely new product - the original press release dates back to 2017, but I was told that the product has only been available since last year - but I had never heard of it, and I feel like it could be a great solution for a specific group of people.
Having to choose between a SIM or microSD card seems to be a real problem for some people, and I was told that some users would take out the SIM chip from the plastic fitting and glue it to the microSD card to enable something like this. Obviously, this is extremely impractical and potentially dangerous to your device, so the FuZion addresses the issue in a much more safe package.
IDEMIA had one if its cards inserted into a Galaxy Note9, and sure enough, it was working. The phone was connected to Movistar and Vodafone networks on each of the cards, and the SD card was adding 128GB of storage to the device. I was surprised that FuZion also supports the higher capacity cards, since that requires condensing even more electronics into such a tiny package.
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Now, of course, you will not be buying this in stores yourself. IDEMIA is going to be selling the solution to network operators, who can then configure the SIM for their networks and sell them to consumers. It's still the early days for FuZion, and while the company didn't disclose which operators it's working with, it did say that one carrier in Asia is already selling it, and the company is working with four or five other companies to get them on their networks, too.
I also couldn't get exact information on pricing, but at least for now, you can expect these to be more expensive than your average microSD card. As the business scales up, that might eventually be brought to more normal levels, but that's something we'll have to wait to see.
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