Apple Creates A Truly Nano-Sized Replacement For The Micro SIM

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micro_sim

Apple’s fetish to miniaturize can never be slaked: a new report suggests that a little over t one year after introducing the micro SIM with the original iPad, Apple’s looking to make the SIM chip in your next iPhone or iPad even smaller, and it could even pave the way for that iPhone Nano we’ve heard rumors about. Nobody sneeze.

We’re calling it a zepto SIM, and according to a representative of European wireless carrier Orange, it’ll pave the way to even smaller iPhones and iPads.

We were quite happy to see last week that Apple has submitted a new requirement to (European telecoms standards body) ETSI for a smaller SIM form factor — smaller than the one that goes in iPhone 4 and iPad,” said Anne Bouverot, Orange’s head of mobile services.

“They have done that through the standardization route, through ETSI, with the sponsorship of some major mobile operators, Orange being one of them,” she told the Paris leg of the Reuters Global Technology Summit.

Don’t expect the zepto SIM until 2012, at the very earliest: the gears move slow amongst wireless carriers.

If this rumor is true, it would seemingly contradict last year’s reports that Apple was working on a reprogrammable SIM module that would allow users to switch carriers on the fly with their iPhones, no unlocking or jailbreaking required.

It would be sad to see Apple’s plans to turn the existing wireless carrier model on its head fizzle out by radically changing the fundamentals of how smartphones connect to their networks, but then again, Cupertino’s made record profits exploiting the existing model. They’re unlikely to do anything to jeopardize the business model that has made them the biggest and most valuable company in tech.

In the mean time, I guess the rest of us will just have to make do with our thinner iPhones.

[via Macrumors]

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