Slashdot Mirror
Nano-SIM Decision Delayed
judgecorp writes "The decision on the next generation of even-smaller SIM cards for phones and other devices has been delayed by standards body ETSI, and the issue (which should have been settled this week) is nowhere near resolution. Apple wants to trim the existing micro-SIM further, Nokia wants to move to something like a micro-SD card which may involve patents. Meanwhile RIM has complained about Apple's approach."
Its small enough as it is
Havent used a micro SIM, but they look like they are just asking to get lost
Some of us often carry SIM's in wallets,etc to change them as per need.
Now, to deal with nano SIM's, a carrier will probably be needed
Whats the point?
I'm struggling to handle these things with my fat fingers already. And devices are getting so small that you have to wonder whether, if we want any foorm of interaction, we are on the edge of small enough. Now capacity and power, pile it on.
Why do you want to break it in something as simple as a SIM?
I'd honestly prefer not to have a SIM and do some form of activation either OTA (over the air) or tethered. I do see the benefit of a card that can be swapped for obvious reasons such as going to a water park (where you take the ultra cheap, who cares if it dies phone), or travelling to a different country where you might buy a prepaid SIM on a local carrier. However we should be able to solve that OTA in some fashion. Perhaps the phones come up with the ability to connect to a clearing house for personalization similar to how they come up able to make emergency services calls? Enter your credentials and they get hashed and sent to the service which then presents back your options "activate device on existing plan, disabling existing phone", "purchase a travel pre-paid account", etc. Why must we have physical cards to prove identity?
Tme for all the hypocrites to come out against apple who is offering a free, perpetual license for the relevant patents, in favor of those who won't do the same, only because they have an irrational hatred of apple. Just look at the first post.
Negotiations are at a standstill because the corporations involved can't determine the best way to rape the customer. Apple wants to shove it down their throats. RIM wants to shove it up their butt. Nokia isn't sure whether to go for the crotch, or the ear. They also haven't decided whether they'll take turns, or do it all at once. But they are all in agreement that whichever route they go, what they shove into the customer will be both smaller and more expensive than anything designed yet.
#fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
It's that they aren't very usefull. Give them a bit more storage capacity, and make a proper, full-featured, standardized format for storing contact data and the like on it. Last time I moved a sim card from one phone to another, I ended up having to manually edit all of the contact details to fix things because phone manufacturers can't get their shit together.
Why do we even have SIM cards at all? My impression is that they're basically read-only storage for a set of identifiers/credentials used by the carrier. Why not just allow the customer or company to input/transfer those credentials as needed? Or just allow a customer to fire up a new phone, input a username and password for their account, and then have the phone download the information needed to some bit of internal storage?
I'm actually asking, as I honestly don't know. What does the continued existence of a read-only SIM card which must be inserted into the phone win us?
Yeah, fuck Apple! They're trying to get a royalty-free standard for a tiny SIM card established! How dare they!
Except that Apple didn't do anything except trim down the current version of the SIM card leaving only the metal contacts. There's nothing in the proposal by Apple that Apple actually created. They are essentially saying "I'll license 'trimming a normal SIM down to size with a razor blade' for free! All we ask is that you offer the same deal if your proposal is adopted."
It's... weird.
Of course it's "royalty free." There's nothing about it which is worthy of collecting any royalties.
I'm not saying that it isn't just a trimming of the normal SIM, but Christ, they probably could try to get royalties on it some way if they wanted to, which is sad, but that's the state of the business. Even if it is just a trimming, well, it's a smaller SIM, which means more room in smartphones for battery or other goodies. Sounds good to me.
RIM really is gambling on their new OS but they're not the market leader they were. Canada seems to be cursed this way by having its tech giants implode. Good luck to RIM. Maybe it'll work out for them. In the mean time, given their horrible track record for innovation over the last few years, maybe they should zip it and go along with market evolution rather than say 'We're the people who make Blackberry' as though that was a magic spell.
The space trade-off isn't significant.
Tiny SIM's do punish people who use multiple SIM's, common in the third-world. If you're going to trim down the SIM, you'd better use that space to add extra spots for SIM cards!
Required reading for internet skeptics
I don't care about the size of the SIM chips, have you seen the speed of these stupid things, they make a 386 look speedy!
Take Nobody's Word For It.
That's all I have to say really.
but first take the quiz
That being said, bananas are more fun. They are a very versatile fruit (for the passive role, just cut off the tip).
When it comes to standards, less innovation is actually a good thing because it means nobody can patent it or argue that it's covered by their existing patents.
There's no -1 for "I don't get it."
They're going out of business anyway.
That's all I have to say really.
but first take the quiz
That being said, bananas are more fun. They are a very versatile fruit (for the passive role, just cut off the tip).
Ah, yes. Why I come to Slashdot. Deliberately misconstrued statements and advice on how to have sex with something I never actually considered possible.
Technical question.... do you need to wrap it up in duct tape to keep it from splitting (heh he banana split)?
Never mind. Everything is better with duct tape.
Yea, but I'll be the competing standard isn't so royalty free.
"In America, first you get the sugar, then you get the power, then you get the women..." -H. Simpson
Fortunately RIM does seem to be imploding instead of exploding as NorTel did when raped by abusive foreign "management" that was supposed to be leading the company, not taking it for every last "early termination" option they could.
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
There's nothing about it which is worthy of collecting any royalties.
Like that's ever stopped anyone from trying to collect royalties.
true, but it does make it so any FRAND licensing from the IP holders for current SIM tech becomes worthless.
http://www.fosspatents.com/2012/03/apples-us-patent-application-61481114.html
As long as Nokia adheres to FRAND licensing obligations, the Finnish company's position that it wants to cash in on its SIM card-related patents is just as legitimate, from a shareholder value point of view, as Apple's proposal that everyone adopt a royalty-free standard. But Nokia's desire to monetize standard-essential patents is not in the public interest unless its proposal offers major advantages that offset the cost of licensing and the higher transaction cost (which in connection with FRAND patents sometimes involves litigation as I see all the time now).
Nokia could really use the money. no wonder they're fighting against it.. even pomoting their own "standard" which I'm sure they have no intentions of giving away. RIM is also against the nano-SIM - wonder why.. http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-03-29/rim-earnings-sales-fall-short-as-blackberry-demand-wanes.html
If you regularly swap out sims between phones (not just when you replace a phone) having the contacts on the SIM is very convenient, and infinitely more reliable that trying to perform an N-directional sync using SyncML.
Also every single one of the Smart Phone OSs have decided to abandon SyncML, and the alternatives they offer all involve various cloud services. Even if I was okay with storing that information in the cloud (which I am not), it doesn't help me, because my 10+ years of backup contact info isn't on the cloud right now, it's on my computer.
Uh?
Why would they even CONSIDER a patented standard for something like this?!?
What would really be nice is to allow all user state on the phone to be replicated into the SIM and vice versa. For smart phones this should include applications, contact list, and application data files.
Some people want to move a SIM between phones because they have their nice phone and their crappy beach phone. But others want to swap a phone between SIMs as they travel, etc. For the latter, you want the user state to stay on the phone while just changing the provider and phone number. Still, others might like to make a backup they can use to restore the state on a new phone after loss, or on a new upgraded phone. Or they might want to depersonalize a phone they are going to lend to a visiting friend for a week or two...
GSM and SIM cards are over 20 years old, most patents on existing SIM cards should be expired. There may some improvement patents that still apply to SIM cards, but it should be almost royalty free by now anyway.
Apple and their manufacturing partner did slightly more than trim the SIM with a razor blade, that also shaved 15% off it's thickness. Granted, that doesn't sound like much, but apparently it is considered a notable achievement.
make imaginary.friends COUNT=100 VISIBLE=false
Why do people even care? Let apple run with whatever sim they want. Everything else is locked down on that igarbage, the stupid sim card may as well be locked down as well. The industry doesn't have to use crap that apple wants to use.
I have no issue with the microsim (although I think it's lunacy to make it even smaller) but really you'd think they'd wait for everyone to adopt the microsim before pushing.
Most people I know with microsims are using theirs in adapters.
I think apple only thinks of the US shores, there's countries like China and India will hundreds of millions of devices, a switchc isn't an easy thing to do.
I just noticed... Apple's new SIM proposal has rounded corners. Look closely.
Basically, between the SIM itself and the hardware for reading it, that's a good amount of real estate.
Well, except that the actual phone is much more bigger than this real estate. And nearly half of this volume is take by the battery anyway. So upgrading a smart phone from Mini SIM to Nano SIM has almost no visible difference from the outside.
I could see some use in :
- Trying to get even thinier smart phone. (But, huh, well, what's the point of making them thiner beyond what they are already? I mean even today avarage smartphone doesn't relly need to by so thin). I understand the design aesthetic, but what the actual use-case for an overly thin phone? Do you really need to be able to shove it under a door ? Or mail it in a standard enveloppe ? Or having a 3G enabled Tablet, that can double as a cheese cutter?
- Weird shapped phone. (Like a wrist watch phone) you still have the "battery taking up most of the place" problem, but at least modern polymer batteries can have any shape (tuck them into a semi-rigid arm band ?).
- Ridicullously small phone. Like giving 3G connection to the iPod Nano. (But you are going to have problems with battery life, as there isn't much room for a battery in such a samll device. And the tiny screen kind of suck for such small form factor). But at least you can easily cram a Nano SIM in such a small constrained form factor.
- Even more ridicullously small phone. Think Bluetooth wireless headset, except the headset is the phone itself. Outside of the battery life problem, the wireless signal problem (you have people freaking out at the tough of *holding* a cell phone *next* the the ear while talking, now imagine having the same emitter, ouputing the same radio signal but from *within the ear* *during the whole day*), the interface is going to pretty much suck, unless it's coupled with, say, a bluetooth wrist watch (but then, why not put the cell radio electronics in the watch - at least you get more room for a battery and you put the emitter a little bit farther from the skull)
- incredibly more small phones. Like augmented reality glasses (like all the video glasses for iPods/iPhones, etc), with all the electronic tucked into the frame. Again, massive battery problems are to be expected. Or you'll have to carry a box on your belt with a bigger battery in it, in which case the box would also be a better place to put the cell radio electronics.
- Sci-Fi crazy phones. Like a rollable phone, built from flexible electronics and foldable screen.
For me Nano SIM looks like a solution looking for its problem to solve. And most of the problem which I can think of need another stuff much more badly than a small SIM: all of them need very badly a smaller battery and/or lower power consumption.
So to Apple and other manufacturer: please solve the battery size vs life problem first (care about the thing eating up almost 50% of the volume of any modern phone), and then talk about reducing the size about the smal thing which only eat up 10% of any modern smartphone.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
Replying to myself, but:
Well, now that I think about it, abnormally thin phone have an interesting use case:
Users like myself who don't give a shit if the phone is paper-thin or only coaster-thin.
We can get the the phone, remove the original battery, and put some bigger battery with a bigger after-market battery cover.
The resulting phone isn't "mailable-thin" anymore. But at least now it can enjoy a sligthly more useful battery life.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
its not an big issue to make sim card size smaller coz we all love new technologies and also we all like to have portable and small things which we can carry easily.... Ya the only things matters is space not with the technology cozz may be apple have plan something new to add in its products..