Monday, November 08, 2004
Have card, will travel
What I'm starting to see in terms of mobile trends is a stronger and stronger focus on the SIM and memory cards in devices. Nokia has just released a mobile phone made specially for nightclubbing and which isn't all that much larger than a lipstick case. The idea is that the user takes their SIM card out of their 'daytime' phone, slips it into this tiny phone and heads on out for the evening. Cory Doctorow of BoingBoing describes the phone as follows:
The 7280 is a tiny phone intended for use as a "club phone" -- when you get home from work, you take the SIM out of your bulky camera/calendar/smartphone and stick it in this tiny little keypad-less (voice-activated) twig of a phone with a small built-in camera and go out on the town.
I've also been randomly checking social network sites like gumtree.com and have seen people asking not so much that their lost or stolen mobile phones and digital cameras be returned, but that the cards inside the devices are sent back to them. Perhaps what we'll start to see is the merhing of storage and SIM cards that can be transferred between a range of 'host' devices and making for a fluid merging of mobility and purpose.
