Tablets By Russell Holly Jun. 10, 2014 10:00 am
Japanese carrier DoCoMo wants to make the SIM card your gateway to quickly adding service to multiple devices, as well as potentially adding a layer of security when you aren’t near your devices.
In most cases today, users are bound to a single SIM card to provide service to a phone or tablet. The little plastic and gold chip slides in, and suddenly you can surf the web and make phone calls. It’s a system that has served us well for many years, but as more and more users start to use multiple devices that could benefit from being connected, there’s a choice that has to be made.
You can either swap your SIM card back and forth, which is tedious and no one actually wants to do, or you can pay for multiple lines of service to add data to each device. In some cases tethering through WiFi or Bluetooth is an option, but a costly one when it comes to how much power is consumed on the host device. DoCoMo thinks they have a better solution, as well as plans to make it even more portable over time.
The credit card-sized device pictured above is a prototype that would store your SIM card and allow you to authenticate service on multiple devices, as though each of them had a SIM card installed. There’s obviously going to be some sort of cost associated with authenticating multiple devices, but the end result is that the clumsy process that we currently use to share data could be a thing of the past.
DoCoMo plans to shrink this prototype down to the size of the Nymi bands pictured above as they move forward, making it possible to just “wave” your arm over the device you want to authenticate and be done with it.
When in wearable form, the band would also act as a security measure by dropping the data connection as soon as the device is out of Bluetooth range. This is a great deal more secure than not using the SIM lock function in smartphones and tablets today, which is something nearly everyone is guilty of.
Unless you’re using devices that are routinely shared with others, this seems like a fantastic direction for the mobile industry.
More...
In most cases today, users are bound to a single SIM card to provide service to a phone or tablet. The little plastic and gold chip slides in, and suddenly you can surf the web and make phone calls. It’s a system that has served us well for many years, but as more and more users start to use multiple devices that could benefit from being connected, there’s a choice that has to be made.
You can either swap your SIM card back and forth, which is tedious and no one actually wants to do, or you can pay for multiple lines of service to add data to each device. In some cases tethering through WiFi or Bluetooth is an option, but a costly one when it comes to how much power is consumed on the host device. DoCoMo thinks they have a better solution, as well as plans to make it even more portable over time.
The credit card-sized device pictured above is a prototype that would store your SIM card and allow you to authenticate service on multiple devices, as though each of them had a SIM card installed. There’s obviously going to be some sort of cost associated with authenticating multiple devices, but the end result is that the clumsy process that we currently use to share data could be a thing of the past.
DoCoMo plans to shrink this prototype down to the size of the Nymi bands pictured above as they move forward, making it possible to just “wave” your arm over the device you want to authenticate and be done with it.
When in wearable form, the band would also act as a security measure by dropping the data connection as soon as the device is out of Bluetooth range. This is a great deal more secure than not using the SIM lock function in smartphones and tablets today, which is something nearly everyone is guilty of.
Unless you’re using devices that are routinely shared with others, this seems like a fantastic direction for the mobile industry.
More...
