Thanks to the micro SIM, phones were allowed to be designed smaller and thinner, but it seems that isn’t enough at least by Apple’s standards as according to reports, the Cupertino company is apparently pushing hard for an even smaller SIM card in the form of a nano SIM and is currently going up against their competitors, Motorola, RIM and Nokia in hopes of making the nano SIM an industry standard for miniaturized SIM cards.
If this were to go through, it seems that handset manufacturers will be able to use Apple’s design under licenses of course, but apparently these companies are worried that Apple would eventually come to own the patent, and based on the current patent wars waged by Apple against their Android competition, the last thing these manufacturers are looking for is yet another long and drawn out court battle over alleged patent infringements.
This is not new as there have been talks in the past that Apple was looking to get rid of SIM cards altogether by introducing an embedded SIM card that could be reprogrammed depending on which carrier the user chooses to subscribe to. Unfortunately this was met with a lot of resistance as many carriers would lose money they are getting from selling SIM cards. In any case, a final decision on the proposals is expected to be made next week, so we guess we will wait until then to see how this plays out.
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