My iPhone 4s has conked out, and I need to buy a new-to-me one. I use an AT&T pre-paid plan, so all I want to do is take the SIM card out of my dead iPhone and put it into a living one, and resume life as an AT&T smartphone owner.
Looking around on Amazon, I see iPhones for sale that are tied to certain carriers. I’ve seen others where the listing says that the phone in question does not have a SIM card tray (although no such verbiage on any AT&T iPhone listing that I’ve seen).
So when I see AT&T iPhones for sale on Amazon, is it safe to assume that they’ll have a SIM card tray, and that I can put my current SIM card in there and it will be compatible with my current AT&T plan?
yes, AT&T and T-Mobile iPhones are GSM and have always used SIM cards, though the warning above about making sure it’s the right size is spot on.
Verizon and Sprint iPhones are CDMA and are carrier-locked. even the LTE ones which do use SIM cards, because (I think) as of right now voice traffic still uses the CDMA network.
Not exactly sure how it works with prepaid, but SIM cards themselves are so cheap to manufacture as to be disposable. A friend of mine who has at&t (but not prepaid) upgraded his phone online and when the new one came in the mail it had its own, newer, smaller-size SIM card. He activated the new phone/SIM (which in turn deactivated the old one) but he didn’t like the phone and wanted to exchange it for a different one (you get 30 days to do this once). But because he ordered it online once he activated the new SIM card the old one wouldn’t work (and couldn’t be re-activated online).
Anyway, he just went to an at&t store, told them what happened, and they just put a new SIM card in his old phone and reactivated it. Took them like a minute to do and they didn’t charge him anything. When he got his second new one in the mail it again came with the newer size card, but everything still activated-deactivated online just fine.
So you might want to ask if you can do this with a prepaid, then you wouldn’t have to be concerned about SIM card compatibility. I would assume a prepaid SIM would contain the phone’s IMEI number and the amount of minutes, so they should be able to transfer that info to a new SIM card same as with a contract phone.