SIM Card Adapters Reviewed

A few weeks ago, I was genuinely questioning what SIM adapter I should buy. After all, while a SIM adapter is generally cheap and also a relatively simple product, the consequences for poor design can be catastrophic. As a product of today’s need to ensure that phones and other mobile devices are made as small as possible, it’s often the case that the SIM slot is soldered to the logic board, which is often one of the most expensive parts of the device. This mean that ruining the SIM slot by using the wrong five dollar adapter can easily cause over a hundred dollars in damage.

So I decided to buy every distinct type of SIM adapter on the market. To my understanding, there are only three main types, all of which are simply variations upon each other. The first is the simple cutout. This is effectively just a piece that would be the same size and shape as the “waste” plastic that is produced when stamping out a larger SIM to a smaller one. This is a very simple design, and requires a piece of scotch tape on the plastic side of the SIM in order to make the SIM and adapter into a single piece that goes into the phone.

The second type of adapter takes the cutout format and adds small notches in the corners to hold the SIM inside without glue. This is one of the most expensive adapters I’ve seen on Amazon.

The final type of adapter is another variation upon the cutout, simply adding a plastic backing to the area that is open on both sides in a cutout. This allows the SIM to be placed inside the adapter without falling out in some orientations, but requires double-sided tape to hold the SIM in place without issue.

So which of the three is best? It’s tough to say, as all have their idiosyncrasies. The second type of adapter is simply impossible to recommend though, it ends up visibly thicker than a standard SIM. This can easily be a problem, as the pins that make contact with the SIM are fragile, and any significant deviation from a standardized thickness can cause the SIM slot to no longer accept non-adapted SIMs. The third type requires double-sided tape to not risk the SIM falling out in some strange manner, and has to be thicker than the SIM that it is adapting as a function of its design, although it can be made much thinner than the second type. The simple cutout is ultimately thicker than the SIM itself, but only by the thickness of the tape used. Personal experience with phones has shown that a single layer of scotch tape is often the difference between frequent SIM disconnect errors and no problems at all, so I suspect that it’s within tolerances as well.

Ultimately, the simple cut-out is likely to be the best choice, and it’s the one that I’m willing to risk my phone with. However, it’s absolutely critical to make sure that strong scotch tape is used to make the adapter/SIM combination, and to never try inserting the adapter by itself. Ultimately, while the other solutions are more novel, with all of their disadvantages it’s tough to recommend them, although the third type of adapter can be used in a pinch. For future reference, I’ve placed a table of all the adapters I’ve bought below to provide more examples.

Some Thoughts on Half-Life 2 and Portal on Shield

If you talked to me seven years ago, the concept of phone games beyond Snake and basic flash games would’ve been beyond me. That wasn’t really on my mind, especially because playing games like Battlefield 2 effectively required a desktop. I did try it on a Dell XPS M170, with an Nvidia 7800 GTX graphics card, 1 GB of RAM, and a Pentium M processor, but even then, it was no guarantee that it would load the game consistently. Crashes to desktop were common because of the RAM requirements, and hitting the page file would cause frustrating freezes. Of course, things have completely changed since then. Mobile became one of the fastest growing sectors in the tech industry, 40-60mm thick, 14 pound laptops were no longer necessary to play  games at acceptable IQ/FPS levels, and the slate-style smartphone has gone from distant curiosity to everyday necessity.

So the port of Half-Life 2 and Portal to the Shield was interesting, because I’ve seen the sheer breadth of experiences that Source can provide, from Resistance and Liberation to Nightmare House 2. Nvidia has stated that Half Life 2 on Android is a port of the Linux version with OpenGL support to OpenGL ES, and based upon a casual playthrough of both Half Life 2 and Portal, it’s not immediately obvious that there are any issues with the engine port itself. In fact, it runs quite well. When immersed in playing the game, the experience is incredible, especially compared to the experience that one usually gets on handheld consoles like the PS Vita and 3DS. While I was concerned that the control scheme would be difficult to adapt to as a PC gamer, it turns out that with auto-aim and some other compensation mechanisms that gameplay is perfectly workable. The one issue that I did have was targeting things like headcrabs in mid-air, as pixel-precise pointing still isn’t quite there for joystick control systems. Battery life was also great. I managed to go around four hours of nonstop gaming at a mid-level of brightness, although this is an extremely rough rule and can vary greatly. I hope to get more precise data on this soon.

Of course, the bigger question is how well it actually performs. While timedemo functionality can’t be accessed, video settings are locked out, and there’s no console access like in the PC versions, it’s still possible to gauge the approximate experience. Based upon a quick playthrough of Ravenholm, I managed to take a closer look at the FPS instead of relying purely upon subjective judgment. It turns out that there’s a pretty even distribution of FPS across the board from 20 FPS to 60 FPS. The median FPS was 43, and overall I’d say that it’s quite accurate, as in less intensive scenes it will stay capped at 60 but anything with effects such as fire and explosions will often cause the gameplay to stutter noticeably, as in the scene above. Portal was similar, but due to the relatively simple level design FPS remained higher in general. Overall, it appears that the CPU usually is only at around 50% utilization throughout the game, which is indicative that either the GPU is the limiting factor in performance of this game or that the engine is not well-threaded for the port. There was the possibility of thermal throttling, but unlikely because exhaust air temperatures weren’t hot enough for concern. Unfortunately, no data on battery voltage nor temperature is given by the Shield. Ultimately, while this is helpful information for someone that wants to buy the game, the real question is how well IQ and performance compare to PCs, and will require further investigation to get a rough idea of how well modern ARM SoCs compare with CPUs and GPUs from the 65-90nm era.

HTC One mini 2 Announcement

Today, HTC is launching the HTC One mini 2, a phone that is supposed to be a smaller version of the HTC One (M8), both in price and size. As a direct successor to the HTC One mini, a surprising amount has changed. The camera is no longer the Ultrapixel sensor, the display and overall size increase, NFC shows up, and the SoC has been changed to use a quad core Cortext A7 setup over the dual core Krait setup from last year. A list of the differences between the One mini, One mini 2, and One (M8) can be seen below.

As seen above, the One mini 2 is a noticeable step up from the One mini. The battery is larger, the modem supports LTE category 4 and carrier aggregation if two WTR1625Ls are on the device (though it doesn’t appear that the One mini 2 has such a setup based upon the information that we’ve seen). The front facing camera appears to be the same as the one in the One (M8), and the design is largely similar as well. On the audio side, HTC has stated that the One mini 2 uses the same amplifiers on the speakers and 3.5mm jack as the One (M8). However, the second 2MP sensor is gone from this version, as is the dual temperature LED flash.

The most shocking change is likely to be the main rear camera sensor, which forgoes the 4MP UltraPixel sensor for a traditional 13MP camera with 1.12 micron pixels. HTC is quick to point out that not only is the 13MP camera cheaper than the two sensor DuoCam solution on the M8, but it’s also cheaper than the single 4MP UltraPixel sensor. HTC remains committed to its UltraPixel strategy, but on the One mini 2 cost has a much higher priority than low light performance.

The One mini 2 also loses Zoe, Panorama 360, and dual capture, only leaving the standard still, video modes with scene selection capability. It seems pretty clear that the ISP on the MSM8926 just isn’t powerful enough to support dual encode capabilities, and it’s likely that Pan 360 required too much compute to be realistically usable on the One mini 2. This seems to also be reinforced by the dramatically longer shot to shot latency on the One mini 2, which can be slow enough to display a “Saving…” toast if the gallery icon is tapped immediately after taking a photo. While the preview of the One mini 2 is noticeably lower in quality and resolution than the One (M8), in good lighting conditions it’s clear that it has better detail, although it will take more extensive tests to truly determine how the cameras stack up.

Gallery: HTC One mini 2 Announcement

On the SoC front we have to deal with the confusion that stems from Qualcomm’s overly simplified branding. Although both minis use a Snapdragon 400 SoC, the original mini featured an MSM8930 (2 x 1.4GHz Krait 200 cores) while the updated mini moves to a quad-core 1.2GHz Cortex A7 design (MSM8926). CPU performance should improve a bit with the move to Cortex A7. The GPU is still Adreno 305.

Outside of simple specs, the hardware is very different from the One (M8). The design, once a wrap-around body of aluminum, now ends around the volume rocker, leading to an M7-esque plastic sidewall that is grippy and makes for a neat design flair. The mini 2 eschews the M8’s aluminum unibody for three pieces of aluminum laid into the plastic midframe. Ignoring the display, 90% of the M8’s body was made of aluminum. By the same metric only 50% of the mini 2’s body is aluminum. Even the One mini 2’s conservative use of aluminum is substantial compared to other phones with similar specs.

Note that although the volume rocker on our gunmetal gray sample is silver, that will only apply to the first batch of units to hit store shelves. Subsequent batches of gunmetal One mini 2s will have a gunmetal volume rocker that matches the rest of the device. Just like the M8, the One mini 2 will be available in silver and gold as well.

The dual stereo speakers are still present, and HTC has moved the proximity/light sensor to the left side of the phone, and pushed the front facing camera to the right to equalize the width of the two speaker grilles. The display grows in size compared to the original mini (4.5″ vs 4.3″), although it’s still a 720p LCD panel. The larger display drove a larger chassis, which also enabled the use of a slightly larger battery (7.98Wh vs 6.84Wh). With very low power hardware under the hood, the One mini 2 should be pretty decent when it comes to battery life.

This phone looks and feels very much like a merger of the One 2013/M7 and the M8, even in size. The top-mounted 3.5mm jack, power button on the top-left, and single LED flash to the left of the camera are all reminiscent of the M7. While the One mini 2 is still significantly smaller than the One (M7), it is much closer than one would expect, and their sizes are almost equivalent. If the One mini was “just right” for you, the One mini 2 is likely to be at the edge of comfort or slightly too large. For most people, I suspect that this will be of a much more comfortable size than the One (M8), although the display placement still feels too tall due to the on screen buttons, which shift the keyboard further up than one might expect.

The addition of a microSD slot and nano SIM support are borrowed from the M8

The One mini 2 is definitely an upgrade from the original. Just like with the One mini, expectations have to be adjusted to fit the lower price bracket that this phone will slot in. The One mini 2 isn’t just a smaller version of the M8, but like its predecessor it is also a lower specced device. 

Unlike its predecessor however, the One mini 2 launches in a world where the Moto G LTE will soon exist. With similar hardware underpinnings but priced at $219 compared to the One mini 2’s $360+ expected price point, HTC is betting on its material choice and design to move units. It’s a conscious bet that look and feel matter more than specs at this price point. There’s definitely room for HTC to price the One mini 2 above the Moto G LTE, but it’s difficult to judge just how much higher HTC can go.

The One mini 2 will be available in Europe and Asia beginning in June. There’s no US launch planned at this point.