Does the iPhone 3G need a Sim card?

iPhone 3G, released in 2008, 16 years ago can't be used as a cell phone in just about any location in the world today. It is not LTE/4G capable. 3G service has been shuttered just about everywhere. It's an ancient device, not usable anymore for much of anything.

Just as lobesterghost1 said, the iPhone 3G can't be used to make calls because most carriers have shut down their 3G infrastructure in favor of the faster 4G/5G standards. You could probably do other things with it, web browsing will probably a pain though, but nothing that requires a connection to a cell tower.

Cheers,

Jonasilver137

That phone has a 32-bit processor with only 1/8th of a gigabyte of RAM, and cannot be updated to anything higher than iOS 4.(whatever). My suspicion is that it can't access the App Store any more – and that even if it could, you'd find little or nothing there that would run on it. As old as the version of Safari in that version of iOS is, you might run into problems with Web browsing, as well.

So it's not useful for running new apps, and given that cellular networks in many parts of the world don't support it, or soon won't support it, it's not too useful as a phone, either.

If you were thinking about buying one for use as a phone – give it a hard pass. If you already have one, the main use for it now would be as an iPod touch music player. (Those phones came with 8 GB or 16 GB of storage, so might be able to hold 100 or 200 albums encoded at a low 128 Kbps bit rate.). Or a high-tech paperweight.