Phone Card

Phone Card
By: Liuba Ceban

Have you ever thought what’s the deal with that golden-colored plate, inserted to your mobile phone? I did, so I looked for the information and now I can share with you what I found out.

When I was a little girl, I was always interested to know what is inside of the different devices and tools my dad was keeping in his garage. I wanted to know what he stores in his different sizes boxes, what is in his furniture. My dad used to spend a lot of time in his garage, the thing that often made my mom be mad at him.

Being a kid, I was thinking: “As my dad, an adult, is interested to spend so much time with his spare parts for his cars, for the radio and for his tools, there is something interesting about them, my mom doesn’t know about”.

So, whenever I had a chance, I was spending my time alone in my father’s garage, trying to find out his secret. I wasn’t able to understand what was keeping him there, but I got curious and interested to get to know about all the staff, which was kept in garage.

My curiosity had so many places to get satisfaction. Sometimes this curiosity led me to disclose the radio, my father was listening to all the time, being in the garage. For sure, I even tried to repair it several times until it stopped working. Even now my father has in his garage 5 broken radios, which I tried to repair!

This curiosity is still with me and I am glad for that. For sure, it affected my computer, as when I purchased it I didn’t have any knowledge in hardware and software. I didn’t even know the difference between them. But I wanted to know what computer is. This made me try different programs, go to different setups and learn to manage them. There were several times, when my good friends had to come and repair my computer, but the good news is that I learned so many new things!

Guess what is my next curiosity technical obsession? I can tell you. This is my mobile phone. In my country I had to buy a phone and the number for it separately. I was curious to understand how they get connected. And I got to know that there is a golden-colored plate, which should be inserted in the mobile phone, which contains my number. Looking carefully on that plate, I didn’t find out anything. So, I gave up for a while with the only understanding that that plate is called phone card.

For a not long time ago I started to work for a company, which provides different software, including the mobile phones software. There again I heard about this golden colored plate. Studying this company‘s products, I found out that this plate contains a chip, which has information stored on it. I saw this chip inserted on smart cards and tokens, they provide software for too.

First I found out that my card’s memory is partially filled with the wireless connection provider’s information and that there is a free space available for the data about my contacts, I can add and manage. Provider inserted my phone number on the card, its name and other data, which cannot be deleted or replaced by myself. The other part of the memory can be used for data storage, like my phone numbers or SMSs. Some of the information, which I may insert, can be stored on this card, another one - on the phone’s memory.
Now I wanted to get access to my personal data on the card. I was thinking for a longer time about the opportunity to do it with the card management software on my computer, which could help me easily make order in my phone entries (like editing some numbers, deleting other and adding new once).
The company I work for provided me with the opportunity to test a easy-to-use software, called Dekart SIM Manager. This software helped me easily get inside my phone card. You can imagine how happy I was that I finally was getting a chance to access my phone data by using personal computer instead of phone’s keypad! I was anticipating my long time wish accomplishment. It was so exciting!
Thanks to Dekart SIM Manager I got to know that my card has protection tools, like PIN codes. I heard of them and was always confuse about using them. Now with this friendly designed software I was able easily to manage these codes too.

One new thing I was able to find out from the developer of this software, is that it also supports the Universal phone cards found in third-generation generation mobile wireless systems, as well as different types of GSM phone cards, containing more than 250 phonebook entries.My needs as an individual user were totally satisfied by this software’s opportunities to manage my contacts and codes. I think it may be for real use for GSM operators, requiring such special features as possibility to view SIM serial number, PIN1 state, technical data of the phonebook, its memory size and the number of free entries.