Although major phone manufacturers often are smart card foes, some actors in this field pay great interest to SIM cards. One of them is Purple Labs, which designs specific devices for MNOs. Since their customers like smart cards, they understand their importance.
Jean-Marie André, of Purple Labs, made a presentation at the SIM Summit in Prague. I could not attend it, but the slides are very interesting. They show the changes that new SIM architectures will bring to mobile devices. Some of them are expected, like adding USB host support; some of them cause design issues, like the placement of a NFC antenna (the largest it is, the better the more power is gives when battery is down). In terms of software, some changes are also required, like a TCP/IP stack.
Jean-Marie André also makes one very interesting remark: the SIM has a life of its own, as it can initiate calls, connect to the Internet, etc. In several use cases, such as the smart card Web server model, the SIM can initiate a connection, or receive an incoming connection from the outside. This means that the phone will have to act as a router for the SIM card (I am not sure that all device vendors agree on this one).
Finally, Jean-Marie André proposes a use case for large memory cards, which corresponds fairly well to the discourse I have been hearing from Bouygues Telecom’s Cédric Nicolas about large memory SIM cards. The memory can be used to store operator-specific software, which will then be loaded on the mobile device upon pairing with the SIM. This infrastructure is of course very interesting for Purple Labs’ business model, and I am convinced that it could be interesting for many mobile software developers. But once again, how will Nokia and the other device guys take this?
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