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A teeny-tiny phone with a worldwide roaming SIM is just one of the products we’re looking forward to at the huge mobile phone event of the year, Mobile World Congress, which starts on 15 February.
Roamobi is a SIM card and a range of super-cheap phones especially designed for you itchy-footed travellers who don’t want to pay extra for calls, texts and data while you’re abroad.
The SIM card is the smart bit, with built-in technology that helps it recognise available networks, and automatically reroute your outgoing calls to local access numbers, so your pricey outgoing roaming calls become less damaging incoming calls. It will also support multiple incoming numbers, and automatically assign you with a local number when you roam into countries where the networks support that feature.
The company that makes the Roamobi, IP2 Mobile, also keeps the roaming costs down by staying off the big
international networks and brokering deals with the upstarts within
each country.
You can pop the Roamobi SIM card into any unlocked phone, but since not everyone has one of those, IP2 has commissioned a phone from Hyundai, which takes a break from cars and mega-ships to make an incredibly basic phone. With a black and white screen and support for only voice calls and SMS, this won’t be a phone to flash in front of your homeys. But IP2 Mobile tells us the SIM card and phone will only cost $20 (£12.30), with the SIM running to about half that without the phone.
Roamobi will be officially launched at MWC in February, where we hope to find out more about where we can buy one of our very own.
We also expect to see heaps of mobile security gadgets at this year’s MWC, kicking off a year when investing heavily in a new smart phone means losing your mobile in a cab has become that much more painful. A Bluetooth alarm that goes off when your phone takes a walk, as well as backs up your contacts, is coming from i-migo.
On the flipside, a Bluetooth tag from nio attaches to your bags and swags and sets off an alarm on your phone if you stray too far from your stuff.
Stay tuned to Crave for all of the upcoming phones and gadgets from MWC this year.
