There is lots of debate over at Howardsfourm(a BB like Flyertalk devoted to the disscussion of cell phones/PDAs, cell phone technology and the cell providers) about this very topic, are UICC(Universal Integrated Circuit Card) with a USIM(Universal Subscriber Identity Module) application required for accessing the UMTS network.

It seems that the USIM application is definantely required if your provider has branded the phone/pda in way or you account has been provisioned with UMTS access. However, it also appears that if the phone/pda is unbranded and shipped with the OEM software and the users account is provisioned with normal GPRS/EDGE access than the USIM application is not required and UICC with the SIM application is all that is required.

What does this all mean? That nobody(except those engineers who work for the cell providers really know if a USIM is required.

Dan