Rambling thought

Whilst we mainly appreciate techie things, there is a system invention that I think is very clever!

The humble SIM Card.

Functionally unchanged since introduction

Truely International

In fact the whole phone system demonstrated the sort of global cooperation that can he had when commecial interests are on offer.

Where ever you are in the world, the charge for using the phone will find its way into your account.

All very clever I think.

Reply to
DerbyBorn
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I think current USIMs for 3G/4G are different from original SIMs, also voltages supported are now lower (so older phones can fry newer cards)

Except some networks in USA don't use SIMs at all, and Apple want to get rid of actual SIMs altogether and use virtual SIMs.

Reply to
Andy Burns
[8 lines snipped]

Or that the evil world-dominating overlords of the UN, in the form of the ITU, set standards.

Reply to
Huge

Really? When I changed from a Nokia to Samsung phone, the Nokia SIM wouldn't fit.

Reply to
Dave Plowman (News)

ISTR that the first GSM phone that I had could only store 15 SMS messages (on the SIM?)

All the other people I knew with GSM phones, had no idea about the existence of texts, and I would send the one as a party trick.

Oh, how things have changed!

Reply to
Graham.

Angle Grinder.

Was there ever a phone that took the entire credit-card size SIM or have I imagined it

Reply to
Graham.

Yep. My friend had one. Oh how we teased him. ;-)

Tim

Reply to
Tim+

Graham. formulated the question :

There was, I had one such - mind, I also had (still have in the loft) one of those analogue phones, complete with its curly lead to the base part and a massive battery under it, which you carried like a small suitcase.

Reply to
Harry Bloomfield

So why are there now apparently at least two sizes of them? Brian

Reply to
Brian Gaff

I think though the ability to move phones if one goes belly up without messing about other than moving a card is very much needed. Brian

Reply to
Brian Gaff

Yes my first GSM phone was a Siemens S3 that took the whole credit-card sized SIM.

It had an 0468 voda number at a time when all mobiles supposed to be migrating to the 04 range ... that plan seemed to disappear with the current 07 range.

Reply to
Andy Burns

Make that four

Full Mini (which some call standard, having forgotten all about full size) Micro Nano

Reply to
Andy Burns

Andy Burns wrote in news:egm204Fns9lU2 @mid.individual.net:

That is why I used the word "Functionality" as I realised the excess plastic has changed - they can be trimmed.

Reply to
DerbyBorn

Given that smartphone tech progress has stalled, I am foreseeing a period of consolidation.

Given how important smartphones have become, the key remaining are to address is battery life. How to extend. I think future developments will be in battery chemistry, CPUs taking (even) less power, and an overall drive for apps to be as lean as possible.

The other way to give an illusion of longer battery life is to have 2 identical smartphones, you can just swap over in the hall before you leave the house. The "identical" bit is what iTunes and Google Play have already started implementing. Certainly my last (Android) smartphone only needed signing into my Google account to be able to sync everything.

Of course that becomes a whole lot easier when you have virtual SIMs ... at which point other developments alluded to in this thread make sense.

I suspect law enforcement would be chuffed to bits with an infrastructure that lets them clone a phone without ever needing to access it ....

Reply to
Jethro_uk

Motorola M301 ?

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First mobile I had (from Tandy !). £129.99 IIRC in 1996.

It was on the 1-2-1 network, "Bronze" contract (£15/month). It's USP was free local calls - which was an open door to the calling card industry.

Reply to
Jethro_uk

Recent mobile O/S tend to force the apps to be more frugal with power (co-ordinating periods of network or GPS access between apps) so screens are the power hog and they still seem to be getting bigger and higher resolution, I guess that will undo any increases in battery capacity.

Do super capacitors have any mileage for phones?

Reply to
Andy Burns

It is a bit of running to stand still ....

Dunno. If we assume we have reached the limit (for whatever reason) for battery *capacity* and device optimisation, the next area to ameliorate the effects of battery drain are quick charging. Battery life becomes less of an issue if you can recharge in 5 minutes.

I can see "a week" being some sort of marketing (if not technical) milestone. A phone that can go a week without charge would be a big selling point. (although it does beg the question as to what a "week" is. I suspect in Marketing Towers, it's *5* days ....)

Reply to
Jethro_uk

That's a bit of a stretch...

quite a number of enhancements have had to be retrofitted into the standard to make them usable today. For example the original sim cards only allowed access to their data storage via a slow (about 9k6 bps IIRC) serial link. This was fine when it was 4KB and designed to store some phone numbers. Not practical for offloading 20GB of images!

Reply to
John Rumm

The original Motorola StartTac (the first iconic flip phone), took a full sized sim card - even thought the card was very nearly as big as the phone!

Reply to
John Rumm

I recall there being a data transfer protocol for the Psion PDAs that someone developed that allowed file transfers using data packets encoded into SMS messages. It was particularly novel a the time since SMS messages were free!

(i.e. before the world had got the idea of "texts", and most phones had no or very crude support on their UIs for text, and the MNOs had not yet spotted a sales opportunity)

Reply to
John Rumm

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