Here's my take on this:
Multi-format sim cards appear to be prefered by both the carriers and most customers for their versatility and flexibility. However, I do find it ironic that phone manufactuers used to warn against using sim adapters and even threatened to void your warranty should the sim card get stuck in the sim card holder. Now that these triple-format sim cards are pretty much all that are available, the phone manufactuers seemed to have quietly backed off that stance.
My believe is that the true, micro or true full/standard(mini) sim cards fit better than a micro sim card with full sized plastic attached to it or a nano sim card with a micro adapter attached. In the case of nano-sims, I recall that when they first came out, customers cutting down larger sized sim card had file their sim cards down to make them thiner. It's entirely possible that some compromises have to made during the sim card manufacturing process to make them universally compatible to all sizes.
This part is a tangent, but the non-multi-size sim cards are safer. Although I actually do like the flexibility of the multi-sized-sims, I have had the smaller part of the sim card fall out of the adapter when handling them.Think of the potential for such a thing happening and the card getting jammed in the slot, or in in the case of sim card readers that use a sim tray, many of those trays have a no bottom to them, meaning that the sim card can detach from the adatper and fall inside the phone! I realize that those cases are pretty rare, but it does happen.
I am not thinking that this is a software issue. I belive that the sim card is not making proper contact. If there is no sim card in the phone, your access point information would be blanked out.
It is entirely possible for your sim card to work in a different phone but still be defective. it is also possible for a different sim card to work in your phone but there still could be a defect in the phone. For example, if the sim card reader electrical contacts are slightly bent out of shape, they could very well be able to read one sim card but not another. I've had this happen before and had to carefully bend it back into place, and after that, both sim cards worked fine. That's because different batches and different suppliers of sim cards make them sometimes to slightly different specs. I wouldn't suggest tampering with your contacts in your sim card reader (you could break it completely by accident), but it is worth considering the possibility of an issue with either the sim card reader or the sim card itself.
