What's on my SIM?

[Jon12345]

I'm changing phones from a Samsung Galaxy S5 to a OnePlus 3T, so that is a micro SIM to a nano SIM. What concerns me, is that I might lose some data in the transition.

What gets stored on the SIM and how can I find out if I have contacts or whatever stored on there?

Thanks,

Jon

 

[ratsttam]

While the sim could store contacts, almost all androids store your contact information locally and attached to your gmail account. Log into gmail from the website, look at your contacts there, and if they're all there, feel free to swap that sim card with no problems, it isn't capable of storing anything else.

The bulk of the sim card is your account information to authenticate to the cellular network. Once your carrier gives you the new sim and changes the sim number in their system, than your new card will authenticate, and the old one can be discarded.

 

[Jon12345]

Is there a way to check for contacts stored on the SIM? Perhaps using a file manager somehow? Does it also store text messages?

 

[Rukbat]

Open Contacts. Edit a contact. The dropdown at the top (which won't drop down unless you're adding a new contact) shows you whether it's a Phone, Device (same thing), SIM or Google contact.

See the Contacts section at Backing up an Android Device. Convert all your contacts to Google contacts, then sync. (You can then go to Google Contacts to clear up any duplicates, etc.) Put the SIM into the new phone and sync contacts (after entering your Google account in Accounts) and you'll get back all your contacts (which is why all contacts should be Google contacts - you can't damage or lose the site).

For texts, use SMS Backup & Restore to back up from the S5 and restore to the 3T.

What's on the SIM card, other than contacts (which is a holdover from back when SIM cards were the only user-accessible storage on a cellphone) is the SIM's number - which it encodes and sends to the tower. The carrier's computer does all the rest of the work, like translating that to your phone number. (And you do have to get a new card, because there are no "make it smaller" adapters [there are "make it larger" ones], but the carriers don't charge for SIM cards [some MVNOs do, though].)