USSD on iPhone
Originally posted on February 2, 2008 in Russian.
Reposted in May to demonstarte the use of USSD.
Played with iPhone a few days ago. Installed 1.1.2 firmware. From what is new I found that USSD Phase 2 intractive dialogues are now supported. One should have expected something like that because firmware was released for the launch in Europe. And as we know, our colleagues from Cellicium made a USSD portal for Orange. Orange, most likely, had pressured Americans to add support for USSD in the new baseband which comes with 1.1.2. I checked USSD functionality on MTS portal *111# which we are developing. Here are the screenshots.
I dial *111# and press Send. “Please wait.” Sounds promising but we have seen this with the old firmware already — after
that we would get “Error Performing Request” and the phone application rebooted when USSD dialogue of Phase 2 would start on the phone.
Cool! I get the start menu! Looks as if it has been formatted to the center horizontally and vertically. Apple as well as Microsoft with their Winodws Mobile treat USSD as something alien. Why not make normally formatted text as do Nokia or SonyEricsson? Anyways… Pressing Reply. Here we see the text of the menu. It is good, seems like they didn’t grunge on the space, well iPhone has a large display. Pressing the number from the menu. It is not convenient that by default you have a letter keyboard popping up, so one has to switch to numbers first.
Next I check weather for today.
Oh, it is nice that I have been “personalized” — last time I checked weather in Novosibirsk and now it is in the first place in the list. A small thing but makes you feel good. 
The price is 13 rubles, OK, let’s buy it.
Before I pressed a button in USSD dialogue, I got an SMS with weather in my native city. I press Dismiss, and then View
for SMS. The number is formatted according to the US fashion, I guess. But weather is just great -12C !
Does this USSD work on MTK platform phones ??? …can u please suggest which are the platforms on which these services are currently supported ??..
please help ,,,,,urgent !!!!
Dear Nitin Shinde,
You have to give me more details about your issue. USSD functionality is dependent on the network: it must be GSM and you should know the numbers if it is enabled. What are you trying to accomplish and what network do you use?
Usually any phone would support USSD.
Ivan
Hello sir, i have been testing on Vodafone network,,,,they have a USSD utility in their SIM cards STK menu…where in this there are few functions of Value Added services (VAS) and on their activation the user is charged monthly for these services….but when we use these sim’s of vodafone on the phones based on MTK platform …then during the activation of these VAS services the there is a error displayed on the screen “Error to Send USSD” but in the backend the service is activated and the user is charged for it but in fact the user is not sure whether the service is activated or not…..
If it works on other phones then it should be the problem with the platform. We have never used MTK. I suggest you contact the manufacturer of the phone.
Dear Nitin,
What is MTK platform? The ussd example in the original post does not use any special sim cards and platforms. It is deployed in russian MTS network for all of their more than 60 million users and works on any phone.
Unlike plain ussd sim toolkit apps are more strict in terms of compatibility requirements with the mobile phone.