By the way, where are you guys from? You who have problems with sim menu etc. Does Nokia sell N900 there locally or have you ordered the phone through Internet?

Forgive my ignorance but what does the SIM menu do? I can find references to weather reports and horosopes (neither of which seem essential to a device that has a full browser) but I can't find any reference to anythiing votal that this service does.

Soemone who is missing it - exactly what are you mising?

Please excuse my ignorance - I had never even heard of there being anything other than contacts and connection details on the SIM before.

It depends on the carrier; hence why I asked the OP whom their carrier was early in the convo. And its not something backed into the SIM as much as it is activated by the SIM but baked into the OS.

This sim menu, the only time I remember using it was on PAYG on Orange to get my credit balance via text message.

I'm now on o2 and I've never used it for anything when I owned a S40 or S60 phone.

I could throw another spanner into the works and say, no mobile phone is a phone, its a mobile radio like a CB or Marine radio. They all use the airwaves there for techincally making them a radio and not a telephone because it doesn't directly plug into a telephone line.

To just use a SIM card to store contacts is greatly under-utilizing the tech. Thing is, because mobiles in many markets are locked, the idea of SIM services is a harder sell/jump than to those markets where mobiles are more open (anyone seeing the connection to Nokia's success yet).

SIM cards can
- play the role of an ID card
- contain credit card authentication data/protocols
- be a wireless contact card (NFC, RFID, etc. like stuff)
- contain a WIFi access point
- contain an Apache web server
- contain an entire mobile OS
- contain up to 2GB of external storage memory

SIM cards also have enough admin and analytic software that if a person had the time and hardware to pull it out and analyze it, could create all kinds of services, conditions, and ascertain all kinds of behavioral information about you and those you connect with.

SIM services only allow the user to access a piece of this, usually to keep that person tied into a carrier for some kind of feature/service. As mobiles get a lot more open, and (a bit) less carrier-driven, these kinds of services will become common knolwedge and in common use to more mobile users.

The OP's carrier should have some condition mandating that mobiles on their network have to support XYZ services... but most likely, they haven't gotten to that point in their mobile governance and support processes just yet. Hence why it looks like to the OP that Nokia dropped the ball, when really the fault was Nokia listening to this community and others who beamoned the lack of voice cellular for Maemo 5, and then hacked something together without understanding the implications beyond voice.

To be fair, there are a lot of things that many people do with their GSM phones that are actually relying on the so-called "SIM menu" and other SIM features, without knowing that this is so. I can, for example, pay stuff with my "other" phone by charging my Visa card. There's a whole lot of communication going forth and back (pin codes, for example) that kind of look like SMS messages but aren't the normal ones. All this is made possible by low-level SIM card features, and they are regularly getting updated by the carrier, directly to the SIM.

I happens to know (being a technical kind of person) that this is how it works, so I use another, "regular" GSM phone with that card. In the N900 I use another card which I only use for simple calls and data transfer.

My point is that it's difficult for a regular user to know that things they take for granted in a GSM phone may rely on GSM/SIM features not currently supported by the N900.

Hey, would it be possible to "emulate" a SIM menu by manually sending and analyzing SMS's? First we sould have to figure out the codes.

and this merit only holds when there is a full detail of the product you are purchasing. When nokia lists a phone as GSM phone, there should not be a need for me to start looking to see what could be missing. All GSM phones come with standard features; hence, I expect these features to be included when you said the phone is a GSM phone. Or when it said the phone is GPS capable, we expect it to perform standard GPS navigation which includes re-routing. Mind you, I did not say voice command... which is a different ball game because I have abouth 2 years worth of Nokia voice command, whuch I believe is "transferable to any other Nokia navigation devices", sitting on my N95 unused. Should we not believe what Nokia tells us their future devices will contain or should we do an extensive research to ensure that those features are what what they ought to contain.

This is what's called the open-source community. You suggest an idea in the right place such as brainstorm or the bug tracker. Then the community decides what to do, then implements what it has decided to do.

A rant thread in the forums is not going to do that. Especially not quickly.

And again, nothing will ever happen at light speed just because this is the open source community. Did we get immediate features/bug fixes for Ubuntu or Windows?

The moral is; and will always be, don't rat out something because it doesn't suit your needs.

I use both Ubuntu and Windows. Why? Because Ubuntu doesn't sustain all of my needs.

Other people get by fine with Ubuntu alone.

Things will, in due time, be implemented. (unless it's an wontfix issue, that could take a while)

I read the first two pages, and then I noticed that I haven't actually used the SIM card menus of the various cards I've had even one single time. I have given them a glance, but I still haven't found any actual use for them.

I have Nokia N900. I didn't buy it for the SIM card menu (I don't even know if my current Vodafone IE prepay card has one). I bought it for web browsing, email and messaging. And videos. And music.

If I want to check my balance, I can do it online.