HD2, great phone, really. Shame it’s not dualsim, and no wonder there are people wanting to make it work with two different mobile numbers. Same thing did I, and this guide is to recount my findings, especially thanks to the italian member mannyy at XDA forums.
First things first: do NOT buy the insanely expensive adapters you find on the internet, it would be plain stupid to spend 70 euro on a little piece of plastic, when a full-fledged dual sim chinaphone with TV, radio, camera and bluetooth costs less than that.
There are two kind of dual-sim adapters on the market, no matter the brand, the “cutting” and “no cutting” versions, where either you have to cut the chip out of the SIMs to insert the in a single adapter, or you plug both integer SIMs into a bigger one without having to cut anything. The adapter I bought off ebay (the auction has been cancelled in the meantime, but you can find it from chinese shops on the internet) is the Magicsim “iphone 3g dualsim” no cutting, but I also own a Magicsim 23th-A cutting, which I have been told by mannyy at XDA that works correctly on the HD2 as well; the 26th should work as well.
As you can see, I didn’t actually drill the cover interior… in fact, in the end I avoided using the dual sim adapter at all, because I use my “SIM1” for my job, and since it goes offline when I switch to the other SIM, I’d rather not lose important work calls while I’m doing personal calls, this is why for the time being I will keep using a second phone for that.
Now, onto the operational part.
WARNING: DO NOT select 007 mode from the Dual Mode menu!!
007 mode is very useful in those phones that support it, since it doesn’t replace the SIM card menu, and you can switch between the SIMs by dialing either 001 or 002 and then hanging up, which is undoubtedly faster than going everytime in the menu; to disable 007 mode, you’d have to dial 007 and then hand up, and the STK menu will be back. Yet, the HD2 does NOT support 007 mode, you will get stuck into it and will not be able to disable it nor switch between SIM cards, so if you are silly enough to activate it even after reading this, there’s a way that worked for me: put the adapter inside another phone, and try disabling it by dialing 007, calling and then immediately hanging up. For me it didn’t work with a Nokia 3310, but it worked with a Nokia 7210, so I could disable it succesfully. I also wrote a mail to MagicSim support, and Cindy from their support (I always wonder why chinese people working in helpdesks always have american names) sent me a documentation doc, which says to create a new contact in your phonebook, called 007 and with number 007, and then save it to SIM memory (not phone memory), and it should switch off 007 mode and go back to STK mode.
Another method contained in that DOC file, was to switch from 3g mode to GSM mode in the phone settings, and reboot the phone, then the STK menu should reappear… but in my case, I already had 3g disabled.
Another detail to keep in mind: I do not have any data plans on my phone, so I have 3g disabled, to save battery, hence what I’m going to say could change for those with 3g enabled. Under the “NO. Hide” menu, make sure it says “Not Connected”, instead of “*Not Conneted” (in other words, there must be no asterisk). If I enable that (asterisk shows), when I switch between the cards, the phone sayd there is no SIM card, and cannot complete the switch, and I have either to reboot the phone, or activate and deactivate “Airplane mode” to reboot just the radio. If instead I have no asterisk under this option, the switch between SIM cards completes succesfully in about 30 seconds.
Disable Automatic connection network setup
Now, the next worst problem I faced, is that whenever I switched SIMs, the phone automatically started the network connection setup with my mobile carrier; I do not have any data plans, so if the phone has the ability to connect to the internet via the SIM, it means I waste a lot of money, so what I did before, once per ROM flash, was to wait that the connection setup finished, then go into:
Manila settings > Wireless > Menu > Connections > Advanced tab > Network selection
and from there make sure that both entries read “Office network”, that way the Edge/3g connection of the SIM card is never used and I don’t waste money.
Yet, when you continually switch between the cards inside the dualsim adapter, the auto connection setup always kicks in, and other than a bother to the eye, it also compells you to go into that wireless settings loop each time to select “Office network”. Not feasible. You need a way to disable altogether the network setup wizard.
EDIT (28th Sept 2010): you can ignore the last paragraph of this guide, I was overdoing it; member xlr8me at XDA found the “easy” way: from Manila settings, open the Communications Manager, then Data Connection, and from the menu button untick the “auto-configuration” line.
The app that configures the network is /Windows/ConnectionSetupAuto.exe, which you cannot delete/rename, because it is in the ROM, so unless you want to cook it out of the ROM yourself, all you need to do is make sure nothing runs that exe, no matter what. A quick repulisti of the registry did this for me: I used DotFred’s Advanced Task Manager registry editor, searched the WHOLE registry for values containing the string connectionsetupauto and made sure to delete whatever upper folder contained a key with a value matching that search, TOGETHER with the other keys contained in that upper folder; quite harsh I agree, but it worked for me, so I am not going back. Another more conservative way would be to manually change the paths inside the keys pointing to that exe file, by adding, for example, .off at the end, but as I didn’t test it, I cannot really guarantee it will work.
