How do you transfer/import the address book from AT&T sim card to a new phone?

Factual Questions
1

I *thought *transferring a sim card to a new phone was simple. That the address book would appear on the new phone.

In this case I apparently thought wrong. Mom’s Nokia from 2001 has 40 entries in the contacts list. I bought her a used Motorola flip phone (from about 2008) for her birthday. I put the the sim card in and the** address book** is empty. I had a oh crap moment and quickly moved the card back to the Nokia. We spent over an hour writing down all her phone numbers on paper.

How do you import a address book from an old sim card? Do you think her contacts are stored directly on the Nokia instead of on the sim card? I didn’t think a phone from that era could support that.

I bought one of these used Motorola flip phones last Spring to replace a Samsung flip phone that I lost. Love the Motorola phone and camera. I didn’t have the address book issue since my old phone was lost. Mom loved my phone too and so I bought the same model for her birthday.

2

Fixed it. I found an option to copy all contacts to the Sim card. Then they were recognized when I inserted the sim into the newer Motorola phone.

Weird that the Nokia hadn’t stored the contacts to the sim for all these years. I thought by default all phones saved the address book directly to the sim card. but this Nokia didn’t until I found that option to copy them all to the sim. That saved several hours work entering them by hand again into the new phone.

Anyway the Nokia is retired after 13 years of faithful service. Still works perfectly too. Just out dated.

3

I didn’t get started in the cell phone game until 2003, but I seem to remember that phone contacts vs SIM contacts was already a thing back then. One big advantage phone contacts gave was the ability to have multiple numbers under the same name. If the Nokia phone supported that, it might have defaulted to phone contacts to give the benefit to the user.