Galaxy S10, S9 and earlier: one generation short of eSIM

Off by one generation

No. There is no eSIM in the Galaxy S10, the S9, or any Galaxy made before them. Samsung's eSIM support in the S line begins with the Galaxy S20, and the S10 sits one generation on the wrong side of that line.

It is an irritating place to be. The S10 was a flagship. Plenty of them are still in daily use, still holding a charge, still doing everything a current phone does. They just can't do this, because the part that would allow it was never fitted.

Why no update will fix it

An eSIM is a chip, soldered to the board during manufacture, that stores the carrier profile you download instead of slotting in a plastic card. If a handset left the factory without one there is nothing for an update to switch on. Samsung could not retrofit eSIM to the S10 if it wanted to, and no app, carrier setting or modified ROM does it either.

You can settle this yourself in about ten seconds. Open the dialler and enter *#06#. A panel appears showing the IMEI. On a handset with eSIM hardware there is an EID in that list too. On an S10 or S9 there won't be. The other tell, if you'd rather go through the menus, is that mobile network settings offer no option to add a downloaded plan at all.

What you actually lose

Less than the marketing around eSIM implies. Its advantages are convenience ones — you buy a plan online, install it at home, and land already connected. Nothing about the format makes data faster or cheaper by itself. An eSIM and a plastic SIM riding the same network get the same signal at the same speed.

What an S10 costs you is the ability to arrange the connection in advance. You sort it out on arrival instead, or before you go by having a physical SIM posted to you.

Buying a physical SIM instead

The routine hasn't changed much in a decade:

• Buy in town rather than at the airport where you can. Arrivals-hall counters exist to be convenient and are usually priced to match.
• Read the ID rule for the country before you land. Some require a passport to register a prepaid SIM, some involve a form and a wait, and some sell them off the shelf with no questions. Our country guides carry the rule for each one — the Thailand guide and the Japan guide are two that read very differently.
• Keep the ejector pin somewhere you will find it. Obvious, and still the thing people are missing at eleven at night in an unfamiliar city.
• If your handset has a second SIM slot, use it. Home SIM in one, local SIM in the other, and you have the same arrangement eSIM gives newer phones, arranged by hand.

Is this a reason to replace the phone?

On its own, no. One trip's worth of convenience does not justify a new handset if the S10 is otherwise doing its job. If you were close to replacing it anyway, it's worth knowing where the line falls: every Galaxy S from the S20 onward has eSIM, as do the Note 20, the A54 and above, and every Z Fold and Z Flip. Elsewhere, iPhones have had it since the XR and XS in 2018, and Pixels since the Pixel 3.

The compatibility checker has the full list. If you do end up with a handset that takes one, our eSIM price comparison is the next stop.

One honest caveat

Our data groups the S10, S9 and everything earlier into a single entry: no eSIM hardware. That is the right answer for the line as a whole. If you have an unusual variant — a regional edition, a carrier-specific SKU, something sold in one market only — we have not checked it individually, and we would rather say so than guess. Dial *#06#. Your own handset answers faster than any list can.