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A new icon appeared between the screen orientation lock and the bluetooth icons in my status bar. it looks like a phone over a keyboard. It appeared today after changing SIM cards, I switched to a new carrier.

It looks like this (the blue icon on the grey bar) :

The icon on the classic status bar

The icon on the black status bar

My phone is not SIM locked and it is not jailbroken either.

No new applications have been installed and I made absolutely no change in the settings appart from the APN for Cellular data, MMS and tethering.

I'm not really worried, but simply surprised and I would like to remove it as it seems to serve no purpose.

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  • 1
    I don't think you should add the answer to your question. In my opinion, the answers belong in the answer section; if you want to answer your own question, you can post a new answer.
    – Evan Kroske
    Jan 23, 2012 at 18:19
  • @EvanKroske I think you are right... I removed the previous edit.
    – Coyote
    Jan 23, 2012 at 20:06

3 Answers 3

Reset to default
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Its the TTY icon, according to this Apple KB. You can go to Settings -> Phone to turn it off.

TTY, Teletype (or various other names for it) is a special device you can use on a phone to help those that are deaf or hard of hearing communicate. Not sure why it would be enabled with the new SIM, unless there was something on the account on the new SIM that enabled this, and Apple did something to read this setting and configure their own setting.

You can safely turn it off if you are not using one of these machines.

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  • OK! It was exactly that... I must have enabled it while looking for the APN settings.
    – Coyote
    Jan 18, 2012 at 17:18
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    As an update: In iOS 10.3.2 the switch to turn off TTY is located in Settings > General > Accessibility under the Hearing category
    – Stefan Crain
    Jul 4, 2017 at 15:16
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From the iPhone User Guide

" Shows that iPhone is set to work with a TTY machine."

Connect iPhone to a TTY machine:  Go to Settings > Phone and turn TTY on, 
and then connect iPhone to your TTY machine using the iPhone TTY Adapter.

When TTY is enabled on iPhone, the TTY icon ( ) appears in the status bar at the top
of the screen.

This is from the User guide. I can't find that particular setting on my iPhone...

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  • Thanks for the answer, jmlumpkin was first he gets the validation. I must have enabled the option while looking for the APN settings.
    – Coyote
    Jan 18, 2012 at 17:19
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The icon looks like that because of what some of the TTY devices looked like:

enter image description here

enter image description here

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