ACCESSING THE SIM PHONE BOOK

The SIM card can store more than just your carrier and provisioning information. Another thing it stores is a phone book so that if you transfer your SIM card to another device, your phone book information travels with it. This phone book is not the same as your BlackBerry Address Book, though. The SIM Phone Book is where traditional handsets store the phone book information they use. Generally you won't use the SIM Phone Book for your daily address book. Instead, if you had previously used another handset, you will use these screens to copy the phone book data into your new BlackBerry.

To open the phone book on your SIM card, click the SIM Phone Book menu item from the Address List screen. A progress bar will display briefly as your handheld accesses the information on your SIM card.

The phone book on your SIM card is much more narrowly focused than the BlackBerry Address Book and stores only a phone number and a name. Even so, you can use this screen to place calls or send SMS messages to entries in your phone book by clicking the Call Name or SMS Name menu items in the same way that you can call or SMS someone in your Address Book. You can create new entries by clicking the New menu item and entering the name and number into the new phone book entry, but keep in mind that these new entries are going into your phone book, not your Address Book.

The Address Book is integrated into this screen as well. If it can find a matching phone number in the Address Book for the selected entry in the phone book, the View Contact menu item will be available. Clicking this menu item shows the View Address screen that best matches the number in your phone book. If it cannot find a match however, the menu item Add to Address Book will then be available. Clicking this menu item shows the New Address screen and automatically copies the data from the phone book into fields in the Address. All phone numbers are automatically entered into the Work field.