I get this question a lot – what phone do you use in Nigeria? They usually come from Nigerians in diaspora who are making more than average trips to our nation. My answer: Tecno – the best phone for the Nigerian mobile airwaves. I bought this phone 3 years ago; possibly, other phones have caught up with Tecno on dual sim feature.
(Do not be surprised – in America, when you pick a phone, you just dial with no need to check if there is a tone. Simply, things work! So, for most, there is a little shock when between 11am-3pm Internet crawls in Lagos Island because of congestion.)
Yes, Tecno had a feature which Apple iPhone and Samsung Galaxy sold in America did not have then: dual sim cards. (Recently most do now but I am yet to go shopping.) With dual sim cards, I can play the game of poor service more efficiently. MTN has the best coverage across the nation and powers my voice telephony. But 9Mobile offers a premium broadband connectivity which though more expensive is industry-leading on quality and reliability.
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So, sim card #1 handles the voice telephony while #2 takes care of mobile internet, saving me many frictions on expecting one network to do both right. Nnamdi Ezeigbo who sold the idea of dual sim cards to Transsion, the makers of Tecno, deserves all the money he is making for the partnership with Transsion through SLOT. He added real value in our ICT sector through common sense innovation.
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This is so spot on! It’s a key factor In succeeding in business to study the target market, understand the user demographic and then identify their pain points. Upon the identification of these pain points, the key to success lies in proferring a solution to these pain points. And this is something TECNO has done. At a time when the use of mobile phones in Nigeria was akin to a wealth symbol, they solved two problems:
Allowing users to use more than one network on the same phone to allow for diversity in service offering because of the unwelcome service issues we have in this country.
Allowing users to use phones that won’t break users bank accounts.
And they succeeded. Till today, this remains the case. They have garnered a loyal following.
Thanks for this article!
“Allowing users to use phones that won’t break users bank accounts.” That is the key line.