Tuesday, July 3, 2012

How to cut down a SIM card into a microSIM... except not really.

I recently bought a Samsung Galaxy SIII GT-I9300 in the 32 GB variety from MobiCity. My only problem is that I'm upgrading from a three year old iPhone 3GS which uses a regular, old and large SIM card, whereas the SIII uses the new and fangled microSIM.

Enter eBay and a Hong Kong supplier of SIM cutters:


I decided to buy a throw away, $2 starter SIM to experiment on before trying to cut my actual phone SIM:


You place the normal sized SIM card into the cutter, which is rather similar to a regular hole punch, and depress the lever with a steady amount of force until it pushes out a microSIM sized piece of smartcard plastic:


The cutter came with a couple adaptors so if you so choose you can use it in a regular phone again. It does make the card quite small:


Now I say "except not really" because my actual real life SIM is too big, as in the contact pads, to use in the cutter. Or at least I'd rather not risk it:

On the left is my normal sized SIM card, on the right
is the freshly cut microSIM in an adaptor.

I'm pretty sure I could cut my proper SIM and have it be fine and functional, but first I'm going to go down to my local Telstra store and have a talk to them (which is something I never really like doing) about my problem.

UPDATE: I found a same sized SIM as my actual one and tried to cut it. As long as you manually align the card in the cutout window so none of the chip is in the line of the cut it works beautifully.


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