WhatSim, a SIM Card for WhatsApp

I absolutely despise the weasel words that this site uses. It is full of outright lies and contradictions. Most misleadingly:<p><i>All Sims make you chat. But this one for free and without limits.</i><p>It&#x27;s not free, it costs €10 for a year. Why then do they also claim &#x27;it never expires&#x27; ? Why do they say that it has no limits, when the Rates page is full of limits?<p>I despise such deliberately misleading text. These people are behaving appallingly. Put up a simple page explaining the costs please (even the Rates page talks in terms of &#x27;credits&#x27; and can&#x27;t bring itself to talk about actual money except in the small print).<p>The website leaves me with the impression that this company is out to con me.

<i>With just €10 you can chat for free and without limits anywhere in the world for a year. And you can do it for always for just €10 a year. WhatSim has neither fixed costs nor monthly payments and it never expires.<p>To be able to send photos, videos, and voice messages and to share your location and contacts, all you need to do is buy a recharge. With a €5 recharge you receive 1,000 credits that allow you to exchange 50 photos, 10 videos or 200 voice messages in most countries. Plus sharing your position and contacts is unlimited.</i><p>Wow, so many contradictions!<p>There are no monthly payments, but it&#x27;s €10&#x2F;year.<p>It never expires, but you have to renew it every year.<p>You can chat for free and without limits, but multimedia messages cost extra.<p>To share our contacts and location you must buy a &quot;recharge&quot;, but sharing your position and contacts is unlimited.<p>I don&#x27;t trust this service one bit, I suspect it will be <i>full</i> of sneaky charges and misleading smallprint.

Can I use other applications besides WhatsApp? No, WhatSim works only with WhatsApp.<p>If this is the trend, then those quad-sim crappy phones I got from China will finally be useful! One for WhatsApp, one for netflix, one for phone, one for internet.<p>Honestly I don&#x27;t know who will ever use this..<p>Also, when I first read the title, I thought: cool, they implemented the WhatsApp protocol on a sim card, so feature phones can chat on WhatsApp! How disappointed I am.

A much better alternative would be: <a href="http://www.knowroaming.com/" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.knowroaming.com&#x2F;</a><p>- It&#x27;s a SIM Sticker that sticks onto your existing SIM - When you roam, it activates, and uses its networks (but you can disable it, as you wish) - Calls, SMS etc are available at very decent rates. - Data is available at very reasonable rates (10c - 25c per MB - this is amazing for roaming) - Coverage is very, very good. I worked my way through Turkey, Iran, Iraq, the stans, Asia, Australia, South America, Russia.. all with coverage.<p>Highly recommended, and not some dodgy service.

Is this legitimate? They do not even use SSL in the purchase page <a href="http://www.whatsim.com/en/buy-now" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.whatsim.com&#x2F;en&#x2F;buy-now</a>.

<i>On the other hand, this is a nice piece of evidence (along with Kindle 3G) that it is actually possible to negotiate reasonable deals with mobile operators globally.</i><p>They probably use Jasper Wireless (just like Kindle 3G)

FOR FREE, FOREVER, WITHOUT LIMITS (10€ yearly for text only, additional 5€ for 50 photos). Die.

Why would a chat-service operated over the internet require a dedicated SIM of its own?<p>This just reeks of bad design and the limitations of tying the chat-protocol user-ID to a phone-number.<p>Until I can log on (anywhere) using a username or email, I&#x27;m not going to consider whatsapp a messaging-service for the internet-age.

I can see the practical value of this, but the net neutrality side worries me. Will this lead to specific SIM cards for Facebook, Google, Amazon, etc? On the other hand, this is a nice piece of evidence (along with Kindle 3G) that it is actually possible to negotiate reasonable deals with mobile operators globally. Hopefully someone soon does just that to give us a SIM card that allows for reasonably priced open mobile Internet. In Europe, I&#x27;m hoping the new EU regulation soon allows me to use all of the Internet with a reasonable price internationally.

I understand what this is but I&#x27;m having a hard time understanding how it works.<p>I understand that it is a sim that permits data-only connectivity for a large number of networks around the world. What I&#x27;m having difficulty with is understanding how the sim limits the user to using only whatsapp. Does the sim analyse network traffic content or endpoint to block non-whatsapp data? Is the whatsapp software supplied on the sim as an STK application that has sole access to the data channel? Something else?<p>What am I missing?

Wow, what a terribly misleading written FAQ:<p>Does WhatSim work on all phones?<p><i>Yes, it works on all unlocked phones.</i><p>That question should be answered with a NO then. It doesn&#x27;t work on all phones.

Can it get even more retarded?<p>Will I have to switch between a dozen SIM cards in a few years when I want to send an iMessage, a Facebook message, upload an Instagram photo, conduct a Google Hangout session. Oh hell no.<p>Just give me a 4G enabled SIM card, a reasonable data limit (ie. 5GB) for an affordable price. I&#x27;ll figure out by myself what I will use this mobile broad band connection for, thanks.

Anywhere in the world but not Macau?<p><a href="http://www.whatsim.com/en/coverage" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.whatsim.com&#x2F;en&#x2F;coverage</a>

Rates - <a href="http://www.whatsim.com/en/rates" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.whatsim.com&#x2F;en&#x2F;rates</a>

So who will build the &quot;Internet via WhatsApp Text messages&quot; app? Should work, right?

ICYMI this is a product developed by an Italian guy who created a sort of smartwatch years ago (I&#x27;m Watch was called) which turned out to be quite a failure. This idea seems to be as good as the other one!

A friend of mine is getting one, as she doesn&#x27;t want to get roaming charges during her vacation, but still wants to talk to people on WhatsApp. Seems to solve this problem quite well. :)

So you need to use a different phone number than the one you usually use for WhatsApp? Then you wouldn&#x27;t be linked to your friends anymore, right?

That&#x27;s interesting, but what are the rates for regular data and phone calls? I won&#x27;t carry an extra phone for each messenger ;-) The site only lists the price for legacy MMS. Also, which country prefix will the phone number have, or do you get multiple numbers? People are usually hesitant to call numbers from other countries.<p>Edit: I would definitely pay 10 EUR for something like this on top of my current plan. In the spirit of net neutrality, it shouldn&#x27;t be tied to a single service, though. Instead, they could just sell a low rate data connection.

Can anyone explain this to me? I don&#x27;t get it from the website.<p>Why is there a limit on sending photos, etc..? WhatsApp doesn&#x27;t limit such thing right?

Canada in zone 3? That seems a little bit too much different.

It is probably using SMS servers to send text messages (that&#x27;s why it&#x27;s free) and MMS to send media (that&#x27;s why it&#x27;s paid)