Steve Jobs' bid to create a new product category with the iPad includes a new approach to connectivity: Wi-Fi with 3G as an (expensive) option. And the fact that iPad users will be able to buy data plans on a month-to-month basis, without contracts, is a welcome development.
But in other ways, Apple has squandered a delicious opportunity to add its weight to the open-carrier movement.
Not only has Apple extended its widely reviled partnership with AT&T, but it has pointedly made it difficult to bring your own broadband to the ostensibly unlocked device by swapping in the SIM card of your choice.
Instead of using the standard SIM card found in GSM phones around the world (including the iPhone), Apple went with the 50-percent smaller micro SIM format, found in only one other device in the United States: a children's GPS watch.
It's bad enough that mobile internet data plans are not interchangeable. You can't tether your portable computer to your iPhone to use its 3G connection, even though that is a trivial technical matter (and AT&T has been promising to support this feature for months). Tethering your iPad to your iPhone? Don't hold your breath for that one, either.
And while you can buy a family plan to share minutes and unlimited texts for your two or more iPhones, each still pays a separate, mandatory data fee which is about as expensive as a single home-broadband connection.
And now, iPhone owners will have to pay for a second data plan just to use their 3G iPads, which, to add insult to injury, resemble nothing so much as large iPhones.
Your small iPhone has a large SIM card. The large iPad has a small SIM card. Why, for the love of Steve?
In fact, two incompatibilities will keep your iPad stuck on AT&T: the SIM-card size and 3G frequencies.
First, the card. Nearly every phone available in North America that runs on a GSM network, including the iPhone, uses a larger, second-generation SIM card. It's about twice as big as the micro SIM card (also known as a 3FF SIM) in the Apple iPad's slot.
Any carrier, including T-Mobile, can make a micro SIM card using the same manufacturer that Apple used for the iPad.
Norbert Haas is the COO of Lok8u, the first company to ship a micro-SIM product in the United States -- a watch that relays the location of children from their wrists to their parents' cellphones. According to Haas, a company called Gemalto manufactures the micro SIM card for Apple's iPad.
Gemalto vice president Jean-Louis Carrara told PC Magazine that "Gemalto makes it possible for all carriers worldwide to punch out a 3FF [micro] SIM.... [ Jobs] mentioned publicly that the [iPad] will be available in 60 days. A lot can happen in 60 days."
So, is T-Mobile going to start busting out prepaid micro SIM data cards, giving iPad owners an internet-on-demand option?
Not so fast -- there's still the frequency problem. The iPad's 3G frequencies are different than those used on T-Mobile's network, so anyone using a T-Mobile SIM would be limited to the carrier's slower 2G network. That would make your shiny, new iPad about as fast as a first-generation iPhone.
Still, a few people might take T-Mobile up on that possible offer, if only to poke AT&T in the eye. (T-Mobile did not give us an official response in time for this story.)
"The iPad, from what we know, operates in frequencies where T-Mobile does not have a 3G play, and therefore, if you had a micro SIM card [from T-Mobile], you would have to accept the fact that it would run at a somewhat less than optimal speed [than] for which it was designed," said CTIA vice president of public affairs John Walls.
In order for the iPad to connect to T-Mobile's faster 3G network -- or, for that matter, Verizon's CDMA-based 3G network -- Apple would have to sell a variety of iPads for connecting to the various networks, each with its own type of 3G transmitter. Part of the problem here is that there are so many competing wireless standards in the United States, which isn't Apple's fault.
Hackers are sure to try the option of slicing the standard AT&T SIM card (15mm by 25 mm) down to the size of a micro SIM card (12mm by 15 mm) and slapping it into the iPad. They'll have to save the larger plastic outline to use as an adapter to make the cards work with their iPhones again, but that won't stop people from trying.
"The connectors are the same ... and it has the same thing inside ... it's just that the plastic is much smaller," said Lok8u's Haas, adding that SIM card manufacturers slice the same cards down to one size or the other depending on which one its client requests.
That iPad owners will likely consider taking a razor to the plastic SIM cards inside their iPhones, just so they can use the same portable data plan they're already paying for, should tell you everything you need to know about the wireless data industry.
See Also:
- Can Apple's iPad Save the Media After All?
- The iPad Will Violate the Kindle's Space, And Other First Impressions
- No Verizon on the iPad. Is There a Map For That?
- Apple Event to Focus on Reinventing Content, Not Tablets
- This Tablet Pessimist Has Just Switched Sides
(Image via Fonearena)
