SIM contact data

Among the other things stored in a SIM card is up to 250 contacts, consisting of names and phone numbers. Unlike some of the other SIM data that is set by a mobile provider and not user-modifiable, SIM contacts are intended to be changed by the user, and various utilities exist to import, export, and modify them.

Really cheap mobile phones might have the SIM contacts as their only contact list, but any decent phone these days will have its own manner of storing contacts that is more full-featured than the bare-boned SIM contacts, which are limited to a single phone number per contact name, and permit no other contact information to be stored such as street addresses and e-mail addresses. However, SIM cards do have the advantage of being able to be moved from one phone to another (though carriers do make this unnecessarily difficult through the use of phone locking), so that the SIM contact list, along with facilities to import and export it between the SIM card and the other contact storage of the various phone models, can be used as a way to transfer the list of names and numbers from one phone to another. Since on any Internet-enabled phone (which is most of them now), a cloud-based contact storage and transfer mechanism is more powerful, this makes SIM contacts less useful than they were in the past.

Importing/Exporting SIM contacts

 * SIM contacts manager for Android
 * Importing SIM contacts to HTC Desire
 * Importing SIM contacts to iPhone
 * GSM Java API (for interacting with SIM devices)