In Manhattan, people are known to covet a phone number with a 212 area code—sometimes paying up to $1,000 for those three little digits. But in Iraq, the scramble for the coolest number is on another level entirely, with some cellphone numbers being valuable enough to pay off a modest mortgage.

The traditional SIM card is dying. The GSMA, which represents carriers and mobile companies around the world, has announced a new eSIM specification for smartwatches, fitness trackers, and tablets, which allows users to remotely activate a SIM embedded in those devices.

Now that it's been over a year since the Snowden leaks, you might've thought that all of the insane NSA revelations had been revealed. Not so! Foreign Policy just published a fascinating and exhaustive list of every patent ever awarded to the spy agency. And one of its latest inventions is all about your SIM card.

Japanese carrier Docomo has announced an interesting concept design that could change the way we use mobile devices: a wearable that takes the SIM out of your phone and puts it onto your wrist to create an authentication device for all your hardware.

New Nano-SIM cards—the next-gen standard Apple beat Nokia to—have started arriving at carriers. Which, of course, heralds new iPhones arriving as well. Here's the message that iFun reports came along with these specific T-Mobile Germany cards:

Data, reception, battery, screen, CPU, weight, size. These are the cellphone specs I'm concerned. Smaller SIM cards? Not so much. But Giesecke & Devrient, one of the original SIM manufactuers, thinks we need a nano-SIM that's 30 percent smaller. Great?

In order to use the iPhone 4 on T-Mobile you have to jailbreak it, unlock it and then annoyingly cut your fatty SIM into a Micro SIM. Annoying! T-Mobile is making it a little easier by giving Micro SIMs to their customers.

According to a report at GigaOM, Apple's working on creating a SIM card that will be integrated into the iPhone itself. That means cutting carriers out of the purchasing process, and giving more power to Apple—and the consumer.

Yesterday, Nokia had zero dual-SIM card phones. Today? Two. The C1-00 and C2 are both low-end candybars that won't offer media-hungry people the phone they were looking for—but they will suit travelers or cheating spouses.

MAXroam's iPad-friendly microSIM will let you take your coffee-shop wankery from Starbucks to streetside cafes in Milan. Their microSIMs cost an extravagant €75/$95 for 50MB of data, but at least you'll be able to tweet smugly from your iPad, right?

It's a beautiful dream: buy whatever phone you want and then use it with whatever service you want. And it looks like that's a dream that will come true in Japan.

First, the Eye-Fi added Wi-Fi to any camera with an SD card. Now, the Sagem Orga SIMFi does something similar. It's a SIM card that adds Wi-Fi capabilities to cellphones...Wi-Fi hotspot capabilities, that is.

While SIM cards hold all the stuff address books used to, some people just can't part from that old ink-and-paper. The SIMbook lets people know that you're aware of modern technology, yet you choose to go retro.

Phil Torrone and Limor Freid of Adafruit Industries have a video project called Citizen Engineer, where they aim to educate and entertain when it comes to various aspects of open source hacking. Now they've released a comic to go with it.

While you know SIMs as the tiny cards that slide in your phones/mobile devices, T-Mobile has announced an even smaller SIM the size of a pinhead.

Oberthur Technologies has come up with yet another interesting application of accelerometer technology. Their new SIMSense card is the first motion-sensing SIM card on the planet.

The Vaio P comes with EV-DO hardware, but an enterprising modder has tweaked everyone's favorite makeup compact netbook to accept HSDPA SIM cards too, for 3G connections from AT&T. It's not for beginners, though.

Sadly, watch phones still aren't cool, but Dick Tracy called the weekend news desk and approved the heck out of these his and her models from Chinavision. Sporting dual SIM cards, these black and pink pieces of geek arm candy do video and music, take pictures, and feature a touchscreen (complete with mini stylus).…