V3xx

Motorola v3xx Insert SIM Message

Note: Putting the phone in my back pants pocket and sitting down may put torque on the phone which bends it until the internal electronics split, or break, or somehow become disengaged. Motorola has no leverage to tell you that, and even if they knew it, they wouldn't want to tell you about it to keep you from doing it, because unfortunately they're in the business of selling phones, and by not telling you about it they get you to buy another one of their new, multi-hundred dollar phones. Not kewl, but very possibly true.

Motorola v3xx. The SIM worked, then worked intermittently, then it stopped working. (Note: As soon as you get an 'insert SIM' message on any phone, do a backup ASAP, because you don't know when the thing is going to give up the ghost...get the current backup now, while you can.)

I tried the SIM in a different, backup razr, and the SIM was still dead, so the SIM appeared to be bad. I took the SIM and my current and backup phones to the at&t store, and they confirmed that the SIM card was still holding data, but that the SIM reader on the current phone was dead. They were able to read it with their fancy-schmancy in-store SIM reader, but couldn't get it to download my address book data to a new, replacement SIM.

They did show me how to fold a piece of paper a few times into a tiny (about 5mm square) paper stack and tape it to the back side of the SIM so that it was under the metal SIM holder and somehow it got the current phone to see the SIM card again for about 10 minutes or so. The duration of the connection varies. Once you get it to work again temporarily, handle the phone very gingerly and you'll extend its temporary connection time.

If I shut off the phone, closed it, took the back off of it, and while the paper blob above was in place beneath the metal SIM holder and the SIM, and pressed like crazy on the SIM card for about 60 seconds with a lot of force (please use your discretion here...after all, you're talking about sensitive electronic equipment) I would get the phone to recognize the SIM about 10% of the time. (Note: This tends to support my guess that sitting on the phone with it in my pocket bends the phone and breaks connections, because pressing on it temporarily re-establishes connections for a brief period of time.)

Note too: Since pressing down from the back of the phone tends to fix it, perhaps if I need to be keeping my phone in my pocket and have to sit down on it, maybe it's best to be sitting down on the back of the phone rather than the front of the phone, since the bend of the phone would work in my favor, based on the little bit of experimentation and observation I've done here so far.

All my address book entries were stored on the phone's memory, not held in the SIM. The phone held 580 entries. The SIM only holds 250. Somewhere in this world is a really, major-league-stupid software engineer.

Since my phone was now seeing the SIM for limited durations, copying the address book contents was my next order of business.

On my current phone--the one that would temporarily connect to the SIM--I went into the address book > Options > Copy, and found the entry to copy all to SIM. 250 entries were thus copied to the SIM--its limit.

I went to the backup phone and merged the 250 into the current address book.

I went back to the current phone, went to my address book, viewed only the SIM entries, selected all, found the delete all option, CONFIRMED THAT THE 250 ENTRIES WERE CORRECTLY DUPLICATED ON THE BACKUP PHONE, FURTHER CONFIRMED THAT THE 250 I WANTED TO DELETE ON THE CURRENT PHONE WERE INDEED ALL ON THE SIM, and deleted them. Whew!

Then I kept doing the same thing a few more times until all of the address book entries were on the backup phone.

Each time I took the SIM from the current phone, I'd have to go through the press-down-on-the-back-of-the-SIM-card operation until the current phone would again recognize the SIM for a little while longer. PITA? Yes, but a hell of a lot more efficient than putting them in by hand! D'oh!

I've stopped carrying the phone in my back pocket as a result of these escapades.