In response to last week's newsletter on unlocking your phone, reader Tony P. brought up great question: What happens to my contacts if I put in another SIM card?

Ideally, the answer should be "nothing." If you're properly backing up your contacts, your phone's SIM card should have no bearing on your contact list.

Still, the confusion is entirely understandable, and worth exploring on its own. For years, wireless carriers conditioned us to think you needed them to safeguard your list of phone numbers, offering to transfer your contacts between SIM cards and even trying to store them on their own cloud services. Even if you're aware that this isn't necessary, it's all too easy to lose track of where your contacts are stored.

So consider this a primer on cleaning up your contact list, so that everything's backed up in its proper place no matter what happens to your phone or the SIM card inside it.

Instead of keeping contacts on your SIM card, you should consider storing them with your email provider if possible. That way, you'll have one master contact list covering email, phone, and text, and it'll sync across all your devices.

In my case, I use Gmail and Google Contacts. But you might use iCloud if you're all-in on Apple services, or another provider such as Yahoo or Outlook.com. (Even on an iPhone, you don't have to store your contacts in iCloud; you can choose another provider such as Google to back them up instead.)

Here's how to pick your contacts provider on your phone:

Now, make sure that new contacts save to your preferred backup service by default:

At this point, any new contacts you create will be backed up to the source you choose above. The next step is to move them off your SIM card for good.

On an iPhone, this is pretty simple: Head to Settings > Contacts, select "Import SIM Contacts," then choose the backup provider you set up above.

On Android, instructions can vary based on your phone maker, but here are a couple examples:

Let's say you've already been storing phone contacts in iCloud, but now want to move everything into Google Contacts. The easiest way to do this is to export your iCloud contact list as .VCF or .CSV file, then import it into Gmail:

This is just one example. You can also export contacts from Google an upload them iCloud, or look up instructions for transferring contacts to and from Outlook.com, Yahoo, and even AOL. On Samsung phones, the Contacts app even has a handy option to directly transfer contacts between sources.

After centralizing all your contacts onto one backup source, you may wind up with some duplicates. Here are some ways you can do that:

If you take one thing away from all this, it's that moving your contacts around is easier than you might think, and they needn't be forever bound to a single wireless carrier or backup provider. And once you've got a proper backup system in place, you can swap SIM cards without ever worrying about where your contacts will go.

Correction: Speaking of last week's newsletter, I unfortunately erred in describing AT&T's unlock policy. Unless your phone is fully paid off, AT&T will not unlock it. That leaves Verizon as the only major carrier that will unlock a phone while it's still on a payment plan.

So why was I able to unlock my iPhone 13 Pro Max, which still has about two years of monthly installments left to go on AT&T? I frequently switch between phones for testing and review purposes—simply moving my AT&T SIM card to whichever phone I'm using—and this somehow seems to have tricked AT&T's system into thinking the iPhone is fully paid off.

I'm not sure if this happy accident can be replicated, but in any case, I regret the error and have updated the web version of the story accordingly.

Google's Meet-Duo mess: Google has finally begun to combine its Duo and Meet video chat services, so if you open the Duo app on your phone, you'll see Google Meet branding along with a message about the merger.

But for now, at least, the blue Google Duo icon isn't changing. While Google tried to swap that out for Meet's multi-colored camera glyph, it reverted back due to the confusion it caused. As I wrote in back in June, Google's doing the right thing by consolidating its personal and business video chat services into one app, but the transition will be inherently messy.

T-Mobile's satellite internet plans: T-Mobile is partnering with SpaceX's Starlink service to bring satellite internet to smartphones, allowing them to stay connected in areas bereft of cellular towers. The two companies plan to launch the service by the end of next year, and claim that it should automatically work with most modern smartphones via a satellite-to-cellular conversion process.

The Verge has an informative deep dive on the promise along with the potential challenges, the biggest being that T-Mobile's satellite-to-cellular approach will require partnering with other carriers for worldwide coverage. By contrast, Apple is reportedly building satellite connectivity directly into future iPhones, potentially allowing for worldwide connectivity without wireless carriers' blessing. Either way, it's an interesting new frontier to keep an eye on.

Another email privacy option: After a year of private beta testing, DuckDuckGo has made its email privacy tools available to everyone, so you can keep your real email address hidden and minimize tracking by marketers.

DuckDuckGo offers two main ways of protecting email privacy:

You'll find these tools inside the DuckDuckGo app for iOS and Android by hitting the ⋮ icon, then heading to Settings > Email Protection. You can also use DuckDuckGo's desktop browser extension to generate masked email addresses, but note that this requires setting DuckDuckGo as your default search engine.

DuckDuckGo isn't the only company that's working on email privacy. Apple's Mail app now thwarts trackers by default, and its Hide My Mail service can generate masked emails for iCloud+ subscribers. I also still like the free email masking services Abine Blur and Anonaddy, which I wrote about last year.

But if you're already using DuckDuckGo's browser or search engine, its masking tools are a natural fit, and its anti-tracking email address is worth handing out even if you never use DuckDuckGo's other services.

An unusual typing test: If, like me, you spend hours a day hunched over a keyboard, try taking a quick break with Keyboard Yoga. Its partly a winking send-up of mindfulness meditation apps, encouraging you to breathe and notice your posture as you type. But it's also a legitimate head-clearing exercise and a way to evaluate your desk's ergonomic qualities. (Discovered via the New Yorker's deep dive into the mechanical keyboard craze.)

Apple's entry-level iPad is currently selling for a record-low price for $280 (with 64 GB of storage) at Best Buy and Target, saving you $50 off the regular price. This is likely an attempt to clear inventory ahead of a redesigned 10th-generation iPad, rumored to launch in the fall, but it's still a great deal amid inflation for new Apple products.

Other notable deals this morning:

Hey folks, just a heads up that next week's newsletter will go out on Wednesday, September 7, due to the Labor Day holiday. We'll be back to the regular Tuesday schedule the week after that.

In the meantime, let me know if I can answer any more tech questions for you. Just reply to this email to get in touch.

Until next week,

Jared