Slashdot Mirror
Apple Offers Nano-SIM Design Royalty-Free
judgecorp writes "Apple is reportedly offering its nano-SIM design free of royalties, hoping to swing the standards decision its way, for the next generation of even tinier SIM cards for phones and tablets."
Nokia has reportedly responded that they still prefer their own design.
There's a lot of news about this new standard but not much detail about the two competing designs. As for size, yes the cards are physically smaller and use less plastic, however, the design will probably contain details like power requirements, access protocols, etc that the manufacturers care about but the consumer does not.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
First, it is often an attribute of FRAND terms. Otherwise standards could not exist if a company offered their patented technology free but could get sued if they used other technology in it. Like in SDRAM, all the players agree to FRAND terms so that memory you get from one manufacturer should work with memory from another manufacturer.
Second, what "threat" are you talking about? This is a proposal for a new standard. If ETSI does not like anything in the design, they can tell Apple they are not accepting their proposal. Just a few days ago, everyone here was predicting Apple would leverage their proposal to get more in licensing money. Apple says that they will offer it royalty free and suddenly Apple has dark motives and is personified as a bully.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
We had that previously. With CDMA networks. Phones with no SIM card.
And you know what happened? The carriers got in league with each other and said "we agree not to activate phones you sold for your network, if you agree not to activate ours." The result was that you could easily switch carriers with a phone call, and keep your number, too, but you had to buy a new phone.
SIM cards get around that... They still sell phones that are "locked", but they can be unlocked. Once a phone is unlocked, it can be used with any carrier, when you put the SIM in.
*that* is why we're using SIM cards.
Apple's proposal is a smaller form factor, but it's electrically compatible with existing SIM (it can be inserted into a physical adapter containing no electronics and work with devices designed for micro, or mini SIM cards), making it backward compatible. It doesn't fragment the market any more than micro or mini SIM does.
The Nokia proprosal has changes to technical specs, it would actually create a new, (non-compatible???) standard.
make imaginary.friends COUNT=100 VISIBLE=false