Getting TXTs off a SIM

Hi all,

Stepdaughter has some text messages saved on her Lobster SIM / phone
and needs (long story) to get them off and ideally preserving their
date / time / content and other details etc.

She tells me it doesn't have BT or a data lead connector (but it may
well have) so as an experiment we have put her SIM in an old Nokia
5600 I have and used a USB cable and Nokia Smart Suite to backup /
Synch / Explore the phone / SIM to retrieve her texts.

And this has worked to a degree (we have some of the texts but they
seem to all be today's date etc) so is there a std / better way of
doing this sort of thing please?

Ideally we would like to put them on a CD or print them out (I think
we can do that bit), once we have all of them (18 or so) off the
phone?

I still don't really understand the TXT message storage / limits and
the relationship between that and the SIM or phone etc. Like, the Mrs
old Nokia can only hold about 4 text messages and my 6310i can hold
'loads'.

Cheers, T i m

T i m wrote:
> Hi all,
>
> Stepdaughter has some text messages saved on her Lobster SIM / phone
> and needs (long story) to get them off and ideally preserving their
> date / time / content and other details etc.
>
> She tells me it doesn't have BT or a data lead connector (but it may
> well have) so as an experiment we have put her SIM in an old Nokia
> 5600 I have and used a USB cable and Nokia Smart Suite to backup /
> Synch / Explore the phone / SIM to retrieve her texts.

> And this has worked to a degree (we have some of the texts but they
> seem to all be today's date etc) so is there a std / better way of
> doing this sort of thing please?

I have used Nokia PC Suite to do this - is this the same program you're
using? The latest version (free download) does display/save the
original date, whereas the older version didn't.

To be honest though, I have in the past carefully prepared dated
'printouts' of texts (this is before PC Suite got its act together) by
cut and pasting the texts into a purpose-made Word template, and then
carefully and manually added in the exact correct date and time. The
result looked exactly as if they were printouts from some program or
other, and I successfully used them in a court hearing.

> Ideally we would like to put them on a CD or print them out (I think
> we can do that bit), once we have all of them (18 or so) off the
> phone?

If you use something like PrimoPDF (shareware) you can very easily
create PDF files to save to a CD if you want.

David

On Thu, 08 Oct 2009 08:15:34 +0100, Lobster
<davidlobsterpot601@hotmail.com> wrote:

>
>> And this has worked to a degree (we have some of the texts but they
>> seem to all be today's date etc) so is there a std / better way of
>> doing this sort of thing please?
>
>I have used Nokia PC Suite to do this - is this the same program you're
>using?

Yes, sorry (not Smart Suite). ;-)

>The latest version (free download) does display/save the
>original date, whereas the older version didn't.

I took what I thought was the latest version with me yesterday but
when installing it it downloaded and install the 'latest' one in any
case. I think what might have affected things is I think she copied
the messages off the SIM onto the phone itself (or summat, I was doing
other stuff) and maybe that's why they eventually had the same
(yesterdays) date? The other problem may be that on the Lobster (485)
it displays what were probably 3 consecutive texts as one. I don't
suppose it matters if they end up as 3 time stamped texts or one big
on, as long as they are there.
>
>To be honest though, I have in the past carefully prepared dated
>'printouts' of texts (this is before PC Suite got its act together) by
>cut and pasting the texts into a purpose-made Word template, and then
>carefully and manually added in the exact correct date and time. The
>result looked exactly as if they were printouts from some program or
>other, and I successfully used them in a court hearing.

And if they were the un-edited contents, nicely formatted then there
shouldn't be an issue with doing that either.
>
>> Ideally we would like to put them on a CD or print them out (I think
>> we can do that bit), once we have all of them (18 or so) off the
>> phone?
>
>If you use something like PrimoPDF (shareware) you can very easily
>create PDF files to save to a CD if you want.

Thanks for the tip. ;-)

On another (and hopefully simpler) track I was wondering if anyone
has used a SIM reader that might allow us to get this stuff off
easily, if so, what exact model and from where please (I say that
because I had one once and it wasn't very good).

Cheers, T i m

On 8 Oct, 09:38, T i m <n...@spaced.me.uk> wrote:

> On another (and hopefully simpler) track I was wondering if anyone
> has used a SIM reader that might allow us to get this stuff off
> easily, if so, what exact model and from where please (I say that
> because I had one once and it wasn't very good).
>
> Cheers, T i m

Here http://www.tech-pro.net/how-to-recov...phonebook.html is an
article showing how to recover data from a SIM card using a reader and
some recovery software. The article doesn't specify an exact model of
reader, though.