By The folks at SK Telecom have been thinking about an interesting idea for Android on dumbphones and they call the product Android SIM. Take a look at how Engadget’s Sean Cooper succinctly describes it’s purpose:
Android SIM shoehorns a CPU, the Android OS, applications, user data, and 1GB of storage into the card pictured above. SK Telecom envisions it being used in dumbphones — as the CPU is onboard, there wouldn’t be a need for the device to have one — letting consumers move between sets or perhaps to a tablet with even more ease than they already can.
They took a video of Theme SIM, a related technology where they store theme elements and UI on your SIM Card, but unfortunately we don’t get to see the Android demo. Oh well… we’ll give you what we have:
Interesting concept… do you think it will fly?
I personally think its a great idea. This (if I understand it correctly) could broaden the amount of Android users tenfold. People who want to use smartphone features, but have dumbphones, will be able to use Android without buying a phone. Now, I assume it will be a lighter version, but I imagine it would include all the Google apps and widgets.
Also, say you don’t like any of the Android hardware, or can’t afford the one you want, or its on a different carrier, or whatever. Now you can buy the phone you want, and throw Android on it without having to root, hack, mod, cook, and flash. You simply insert SIM.
Correct me if I’m wrong on these points, but right now, I’m excited for this.
That doesn’t look a great idea to me.
All the wireless stuff is still on the phone, bottlenecked by the slow smartcard interface.
And the screen size would still be very very limited, not touch and with a bare 12-key keyboard.
I’m not even discussing about the CPU power, the amount of storage (1GB only?).
Pretty useless in my opinion, but still a big buzz.
If you can download all of your apps to that storage, it’s bigger than most Android phones you see which usually have 256-512mb.
What about touchscreen dumbphones (aka. featureless phones)? It’d be great to have Android on them.
cool idea… will it expand into smartphones? like SIM instead of SDCard? less components will make a cheaper devices