SIM Cards Seen Running Android and Portable Hotspots

The remit of the humble SIM card is expanding by the day, and last week's Mobile World Congress saw the technology running a full Android release, to support a 'portable identity'; and to provide a tiny personal Wi-Fi hotspot.

 

Focal Points:

 

• Korea's SKT has managed to run a full Android release on the tiny card, and was showing a prototype in Barcelona. It has crammed an ARM processor, and 1Gb of flash memory into a SIM to store the OS and some data, envisaging a situation where the user transfers his or her 'identity' and security credentials between various dumb devices. This would significantly push forward the cloud computing concept, where non-smart devices link to peripherals like large screens, but get all their apps and data over the air from the cloud. At the extreme of this vision, the device could lack any form of processor, disk or preinstalled OS, the last of these being provided by the SIM.
• Of course, all that relies on the user having a powerful wireless connection available at all times, and SKT says it has no immediate plans to commercialize its invention. It sees the main initial application being the ability to transfer the user environment between a PC and a phone, for a journey or commute, without the need to carry a notebook. Its actual rollout of SIM-based services will be more modest in scope. From April it will offer a series of customized SIM cards preloaded with applications and other data, including a financial SIM with an app to monitor markets, and a SIM branded by a pop group and including music videos. SKT is also experimenting with a SIM card with built-in wireless electronic payments functionality, which could add this to a handset that lacked the capability built-in.
• Meanwhile, the hotspot or personal router allows several Wi-Fi devices to share a single mobile broadband connection and subscription (usually 3G, but Sprint and Clearwire have a WiMAX version). Novatel's MiFi has been the most famous, and such products, once shunned by carriers for allowing shared usage, are now welcomed as an added value item they can brand and use to attract new subscribers and fat data plans. Then Marvell, which makes the MiFi chipset, incorporated it into a handset, and several phones have turned up with router functionality, including the HTC HD2 and Palm Pre Plus. Now SIM card specialist Sagem Orga has gone a step further, embedding Wi-Fi into one of its cards, to provide another route to the mobile hotspot.
• Sagem Orga is working with Telefonica to enable this functionality with its SIMFi device, which can be slotted into any handset that supports SIM (any GSM phone), turning it into a router at very low cost, but strictly under the carrier's control.

 

"We strongly believe that SIMFi, with its unprecedented functionality for wireless access, will significantly improve the user experience," said Remy Cricco, technology innovation manager at Sagem Orga, in a statement. "If customers can connect their notebooks to the web anytime and anywhere by simply using what they have with them most of the time and what is the most trusted secure device - the SIM card - adoption can be expected to be enormous."