Techy odds and ends

I’m revising my position on the eSIM vs. pSIM debate. Until now, I was strongly against eSIM. Nothing is simpler than taking a physical SIM (pSIM) out of one phone and sticking it in another. You can do it whenever you want and you don’t need your network’s blessing. The only down-side is a security risk: if someone steals your phone they can whip the SIM out of it to disconnect it from the mobile network so you can’t trace it. They can’t do that with an eSIM and they need to be able to unlock the phone to take it offline. Either that or break it, which defeats the purpose of stealing it in the first place. Mobile networks are beginning to cotton on to the fact that their customers don’t want to give up this freedom to chop and change phones whenever they want. Customers vote with their wallets when they see something they don’t like, so the networks are making things easier for them. The network that I was using only started supporting eSIM at all in August 2025 and even then, onl...

Older mobile phones would store received text messages on your SIM card rather than in their own (very limited) memory. Service messages sent to you by your mobile provider are also stored on the SIM card, even today. Modern phones store inbound text messages in their own (significantly more capacious than their predecessors') memory or even, in some cases, on a removable memory card (miniSD or microSD most of the time). Nokia phones based on S60v3 with feature pack 2 and later (N78, N96, 5800 XpressMusic, N97 etc.) detect messages on the SIM card and, if they find any, alert the user to their presence by displaying a flashing envelope on the screen. The only way to get rid of it is to delete the messages on the SIM card. To achieve this: Menu > Messaging > Options > SIM messages Select all the messages visible here: Options > Mark/unmark > Mark all Then delete them by pressing the "C" key for phones that have it (keypad-operated phones) or by tapping ...