Treo 650 - Cingular Sim Problem

From Treocentral:

Some Cingular customers have noticed that the Treo 650 acts strangely when paired with the Gemplus 64K SIM card. Cingular recently confirmed there is an interoperability issue, and estimates that about 25% of the Treo 650s bundled with the Gemplus card shows the following issues after being activated over the air:

- Keyboard and Screen lockups
- Garbled Voice Mail retrieval number
- Treo Power Cycles on its own

Until a permanent solution is found, Cingular recommends that new customers activate the Treo 650 using Axalto 64k SIMS, or any 32K SIMS. Exisiting customers should contact Cingular to get a new SIM card.

The Gemplus SIM card can be identified by a "G" after the 5 digit SKU on the back. The Axalto card has an "A".

Paraphrasing from a thread on TreoCentral:

Even after putting in the correct Axalto SIM card, the phone can still have problems with a backup file on your PC that contains all of the phone's settings. Even removing the Palm Desktop software using Add/Remove Programs doesn't get rid of the backup file. So, upon doing a hard reset on the phone, reinstalling the Palm Desktop software and doing a hot sync, some corrupted file is sent to the phone that causes it to screw up as it did with the wrong SIM card. The solution is to delete the backup folder before doing the hot sync.

It can be hard to find a store with the correct SIM card. In Houston, the Cingular store at Westheimer and Chimney Rock has them.