iconiphone
What is this icon on the far right of the status bar? It only appears so far in this one app, called Carpenter by iHandy. I've emailed the manufacturer but so far nothing. It looks like a letter "Q" and pulses slowly between bright and faded.
My old picture links broke so I'll edit to put this here:
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.
Try Bartender. This lets you hide (as well as re-arrange) menu bar items, as well as providing a secondary menu bar so that you can hide icons from the main bar but still have access to them on a keyboard shortcut or menu bar item.
Best Answer
It looks like the application is adding that icon. I checked the Level application on my phone (sort of a free demo for Carpenter) and it has a button with the same design in the upper right corner:
Tapping the button gives this screen:
Google still has some update notes cached where the developer listed this as a new feature in the App Store:
Normally, apps can't add custom icons to the status bar. According to this thread, they may just be overlaying the Quick Switch icon over the battery indicator: Customizing iPhone app taskbar