The industry expects that for good or bad, the new nano SIM design by Apple will be approved this month to become the official nano SIM standard. The controversial would-be standard caused quite a lot of criticism from other mobile vendors, who feel this is an attempt to twist their arms.
As we reported earlier, 4 companies have developed their own versions of nano SIMs and each of them is trying to make their design the new nano SIM standard. However, the chances of Apple to win in this battle are much higher than their competitors.
Apple Responds to Competitors’ Criticism
Apple isn’t known for paying attention to criticism from competitors but this time it listened and as unbelievable as it sounds, even made changes to its design in an attempt to respond to the criticism. The main concern of Nokia and the other competitors was that the proposed nano SIM design could be jammed into devices that have a micro SD slot.
To avoid this, Apples added small plastic edges to the card, thus making it hard, if possible at all, to place a nano SIM into a micro SD slot. This would have been great, if it didn’t affect the size of the card. Now the card isn’t much smaller than a micro SIM, which is ironic because the whole idea of the nano SIM was to replace the micro SIM with a smaller card.
This design decision looks pretty cumbersome at best. The nano SIM might be smaller than its predecessor but it isn’t small enough to save sufficient space inside the device, as the idea was. It seems that if the proposed design becomes the standard, we’ll have to wait a bit more till we get a really small card and a really thin phone.
The Decision for the Nano SIM – Fast or Too Fast?
ETSI (European Telecoms Standards Institute ), the organization that adopts new standards is now on the move. It’s expected that the decision whether the design proposed by Apple will become the new standard will be made by the end of May 2012.
Unlike its predecessor, the micro SIM, it looks like the nano SIM standard won’t need years to be approved. We all admire speed but not when it’s at the expense of quality.
Apple is pushing ETSI to adopt the new standard asap, so that it can be incorporated in future models soon. Of course, Apple’s competitors aren’t happy with this and feel that the pressure isn’t fair. To some extent, they are right because if the new standard gets accepted despite its shortcomings, this puts the whole industry at unease and it is easy to predict that soon we’ll be talking about another new standard to replace the nano SIM standard with a really small card.
Such frequent changes of standards don’t benefit us as users and this is what makes me think that such speedy changes aren’t necessarily beneficial for the industry as a whole.
