Archived from groups: alt.cellular.verizon (
More info?)
Don't get me wrong, I LOVE the idea of the SIM chip, however there seems to
be one common misconception about it. While it will transfer your phone
number to any phone you plug it into, sales reps also like to tell you it
will also transfer your phonebook as well. This is not entirely correct.
SIM's were designed a long time ago, and therefore the standard suffers a
bit when it comes to the data it can store. Newer phones will allow you to
store quite a bit of information about a contact. The information includes
multiple phone numbers per contact, email address, home address, etc. SIM
cards on the other hand were only designed to hold a name (only a certain
number of characters long) and one phone number (only a certain number of
numbers long).
So while you can copy your more advanced phone book to your sim card, it
jumbles the data when storing it. Truncating names to the set length the
SIM card was designed to have and only storing one number per name.
This can make some of the data in your phonebook entirely useless. An
example would be if you have a contact name Joe Blow with a cell number of
123-123-1234, home phone of 789-789-7894, work number of 456-456-4561, and
email address of joeblow@hotmail.com. When you transfer this users info to
the Sim card it come accross with a trunctated name, and looses info such as
whether a number was cell, work, or home. It will come across as Joe B
123-123-1234, Joe B2 789-789-7894, Joe B3 456-456-4561. The email address
is totally lost, as the SIM has no way of storing this information.
This can be particularly bad if you have multiple users with similar first
names, and it truncates their full name to only be part of their first name.
So now you have a bunch of first names and numbers, with no way to
differentiate whether a number was a work number, cell, or home number, or
even worse, which Joe you saved.
My example is a little extreme, as it will let you store more than 5 letters
for a name in the SIM, but trust me, I've had this happen before, and it
made all of my info useless. Its not nearly as cool as the sales reps would
have you think, or as could as it could be today if they would just come up
with a standard and implement it in newer SIM cards and phones.
Disclaimer: I am writing this as a past GSM user who now has Verizon and
does not like CDMA at all. I will switch back to GSM for sure once my
contract is up.
"C C" <someone@microsoft.com> wrote in message
news:7l1Hc.3451$X84.446@newssvr33.news.prodigy.com...
> Yes, it is true.
>
> Earlier today, I learned that my co-worker's friend, bought a phone from
> e-bay to replace the V300 that my co-worker is using right now.
>
> This is cool. When you want to change your phone because of damage, or
you
> just want a new toy to use, just buy the phone and you don't have to go to
> your carrier and have the esn transferred to the new phone, or I guess you
> can logon to VZW's website and do it yourself there.
>
> This is what we call plug & play on mobile phones!
>
> VZW doesn't even have bluetooth yet.
>
> "Larry" <Larry@nospam.net> wrote in message
> news:zP0Hc.76528$kz.15213601@news4.srv.hcvlny.cv.net...
> > This sounds a little far-fetched. Moving a chip from a Samsung to a
> > Motorola and it worked fine with no modifications? Am I being naive?
> >
> > Larry E.
> >
> > C C wrote:
> > > My co-worker just signed up with T-Mobile. He said he got a Samsung
(?
> Or
> > > Sanyo). The phone has all the ESN, Phone book, etc. programmed in a
> chip
> > > smaller than an SD card. He has a friend who has a Moto V300 just
> sitting
> > > in the closet. His friend said, here, try this out. My co-worker
> removed
> > > the chip from his brand new T-Mobile phone and installed it in the
V300.
> It
> > > works there.
> > >
> > > Why does Verizon have this kind of technology?
> > >
> > > Any pros and cons?
> > >
> > >
> > >
> >
>
>
/JustThe.net/ 
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