Help with the motorola V170 "emergency only" message?

Question

my aunt dropped her v170 and said that ever since she dropped it her phone has an "emergency only" message where the banner is. she had to have done more than dropped it. i cant find anything about this problem anywhere in the manual or online. removing the SIM card didnt help. it just rejected the card

Answer 1

A guess could actually be that there is poor contact to the SIM card from the phone. I would try removing the SIM, inspecting the reader a bit a possibly put a little piece of thick paper under the SIM to increase contact pressure. Of course one possibility is that the SIM card reader is broken.

When the phone says "Emergency only" it means that it is not correctly authenticated to a network it is allowed to connect to. The tokens for authenticating to the network are on the SIM. It is therefore reasonable to guess that the operation of the SIM are not correct.