DISQUS

The old Benefon Twin was the first (or one of them) with a proper dual SIM slot (though not two GSM receivers) . Horrible phone though, the battery barely lasted a few hours and was prone to static if you had long hair (in my pony tail days).

WND Telecom manufacture some fancy dual SIM handsets, but the best by looks must be the Atom (http://www.wndtelecom.com/en/mobile/Atom-Duo/) which has two touch screens of equal size on the front. To select a SIM just rotate the handset so that what was the screen becomes the keyboard and keyboard becomes the screen.

Not a smartphone, so not one for me.

It may not be very eco, but mophie.com has resurrected the old ipaq sleeve concept for use with the iPhone 3G. At $99 and a hefty weight/size increase it rather defeats the point of the slim Apple design, but I'm definitely going to get one if it means I can get through a whole day without having to carry another handset as just in case insurance,

It was always touch and go whether to develop for UIQ in my old company. What destroyed the UIQ development track was the disastrously late release of the P990i (a handset I still admire in spite of the memory problems).
With the demise of the SE Paris, and few UIQ products nearing completion, UIQ is a dead end for commercial developers. So instead of Paris I have an iPhone 3G and an E71 now. I can only advise my customers to do the same.
I hope Nokia take on the hard working UIQ developers that have been laid off as S60 Touch looks nowhere near as good as UIQ 3.x

Handsets are sold at below cost price so a direct subsidy has to be given to the retailer from the distributor. To prevent box breaking or miselling, the subsidy, and potentially the full cost of the handset, will be clawed back from the retailer if the handset is not connected to the network, or in some cases, not enough revenue (top ups) is made within a set period of time. Problems obviously occur as the retailer has no knowledge of how much a pre-pay user spends, or whether the handset was indeed connected, and so relies on the honesty of the network and distributor. With the bodged accounting systems that have existed in the past, this can be a very precarious relationship.

This is not made any easier for the smaller retailer if the big outlets, such as Argos, get preferential terms.

PS. The second connection can either be Ethernet (linked to a cable or ADSL2+ modem) or the USB dongle. You can also load share between the two. I also updated the firmware recently as there were a few issues with initial VPN connectivity.

Every time I turned the corner to my office in London and saw a BT van (clumsy engineers), or a small puddle in the road, I knew that the office SDSL line would be killed for days on end (aluminium cabling is the worst for cracking after 30 years under the road). A tree was in the way of an early WiMAX type service, pesky leaves, so this would have been ideal.
So ideal in fact, I bought one 9 months ago for a mate's business and it's been absolutely diamond. With the added advantage of a VPN server inbuilt and dual failover ADSL2+ connections at 20Mbps at £100 or so quid.
Just waiting for my DLink to curl up it's toes so I can buy another.