Also thought I'd post this here. I have been thinking about a way to get the SIM card working on CDMA phones, and I might have a great idea for someone like ACL to check out.
While in Android, plug in the USB. As long as USB is plugged in, your phone is receiving enough power to continue running without a battery. Yup, you guessed it. Yank that battery, and Android will still run so you can mess around with the SIM card slot.
Unfortunately, Android doesn't recognize the slot or when you slide things in our out, but the phone certainly reboots when looking for the sdcard on boot if you have a SIM card in the slot. This is happening during initrd phase, so we have something in there that references the SIM card slot properly but must be trying to access it in an improper way.
One of my goals is to force the correct location for our SD card in bootenv. Without having the logic that looks for the location of the sd card slot, I think we might be able to dumb luck our way into finding the SIM card slot
