Anyone Know About Cell Phone SIM cards?

[PJmomrunner]

I'm hoping someone can help me with this because...well...it would seem I am (at least at the moment)...(as my darling son would say)...a technotard. I'm not proud, but I need help.

I bought my daughter the hot little pink Motorola Razr phone for her birthday (Friday). Before doing so, I consulted with my cellular service as to whether I could buy an "unlocked" phone and still use it with my service. They said I could by simply switching the SIM card out of the old phone and into the new. Well, I cannot find a SIM card in the old phone (although I'm sure it has one, it's a Motorola 60i). I'm not sure my cell phone company will help me, but I'll try tomorrow if no one here has an easy fix.

Thanks.

 

[davidfortune]

Remove the back cover. If it has a sim card it will be in a little slot which may require removing the battery. The sim slot usually slides up or down and then rotates outward to remove the card.

Good luck

 

[PJmomrunner]

David, that's how the new one is, but not the old.

 

[Phyllis]

Looked the phone up on my TMobile website- there's a Motorola 60V there- not 60I, but the sim card on that one is in a separate little compartment beneath the battery compartment that has to be slid open same as the battery compartment- hope this helps.

 

[tobagotwo]

Some services like Verizon and Sprint do not use SIM cards. T-Mobile does. When I had them as a service, I swapped the sim card back to the older phone when the new one went through the wash (my fault), then back to the replacement phone. It worked fine all the way through.

Hope yours does have one. It's a little bigger than 1/2" square, and will slide out pretty easily once you find it. Looks kind of like one of those very small memory cards for digital cameras, but a bit flimsier.

Best wishes,

 

[PJmomrunner]

Thanks everybody. Turns out my old phone did not have a SIM card! The very nice guy at the cell phone store (Centennial--pretty limited to the Midwest) cheerfully set me up with one though and programmed it with my daughter's number.

She and I have the same (old) phone, only she's got a cute graphic cover, so I switched covers and phones on her and disabled the battery on mine so she wouldn't turn it on and know it was mine. So I had it while she was in school today and was able to get the new phone working and then make the switch back after she got home without her noticing. Now she has her old phone and she's really perplexed about why it's working now, but saying she has no service ('cuz its been transferred to the new phone). She's giving it some time on the charger for good measure. Hee hee hee!

 

[sylviayasgur]

hi p.j.,
bob is right. verizon and many old cingular 60i's are analog (tdma) phones.
t-mobile will give you an unlock code so that you can use the sim card in another gsm phone. cingular will not unlock the phone for you, but i know a website where for $5 you can unlock your phone with his code. (you wouldn't need to do this unless you might travel abroad and want to buy a foreign sim card that you can use in your phone).
also, if you want to copy her numbers onto your sim card, you can copy the numbers to her phone, then insert your sim into her phone and copy them onto the sim card from her phone's memory. if you go to memory, you can play with it and figure it out. (try going to contacts, then to "copy" and it might say "copy from sim to phone" or the revers.. don't know if it's that way on the razor)
i know it sounds confusing, but it's doable.
what carrier do you use?
good luck. i know you've pretty much resolved this already.
take care and be well,
sylvia

 

[tobagotwo]

None of the current Verizon or Sprint phones have SIM cards. My Verizon phone has GPS and mapping capability built in, and is a tri-mode, which we hoped would bring us service in our travels to the wilds of Maine. But it only works sometimes up there.

"Can you hear me now?"

*silence*

Best wishes,

 

[PJmomrunner]

Sylvia - The new phone is and unlocked phone, so switching sim cards when we travel abroad should be no problem--the Centennial guy actually mentioned that.

Bob - Our service is similar in northern New York. Service is intermittent if we walk up the hill and into the woodshed, stand on one foot, bend over and wave the other foot around. Otherwise it's the silent treatment. Small price to pay for surroundings of intense natural beauty and relative solitude.