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Technology Stocks : Smart Cards -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: gdichaz who wrote (258)	6/18/2000 11:47:00 AM
From: Eric L	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 343

Cha2, << Re CDMA "smart cards" ... Will the new CDMA phones have slots and software for two "smart cards" - one for roaming GSM areas and another more like a credit card for wireless banking and personal data, or will one slot and one card serve all these functions? >> I suspect that new CDMA phones will at first have a single reader for a SIM card. There are not yet a lot of "dual slot" phones out there (slot for a SIM and a general purpose branded private label card), even in the GSM world where every phone has a SIM. Motorola has a few models. A few others do as well. The SIM can contain "multiple applications" and shortly will contain (in addition to Subscriber specific data) personal data for banking and m-commerce applications, as well as digital certificates. There are 2 problems with having this information on the traditional SIM. The first is that their is no "brand identity" for, lets say, a financial card issuer (American Express Blue card for instance). The second is that most SIMs today use the Plug-in format (considerably smaller than credit card size) so the "credit card" you carry in your wallet can not be inserted in this slot (or "trap door"). Below is a link to a site that depicts the "Plug-In) SIM partially removed from the handset: cp8.bull.net I think that there will be more and more dual slot phones as PKI becomes accepted as the preferred way of conducting m-commerce. This will take some time. Some smart card industry observers project that we are about 2 years away from smart card reader ubiquity in the PC world (smart card readers a component of most every desktop, laptop, PDA). Your looking probably at that time frame as a minimum to see a proliferation of "dual slot" phones, IMO. Probably considrerably longer in CDMAland than GSMland where the SIM is standard and smart cards in general are used more prevalently. Issuers of plastic transaction cards are keenly interested in being able to use a mobile phone as a terminal to transact business safely and securely with a smart card. The phone becomes a supplement to transacting business at a POS terminal in a retail store, or with a reader attached to a PC. - Eric -