What's next for SIM cards?

>> You do stuff that involves wires.

>> Yeah, and SIM cards. So thing here is that 3 billion SIM cards are distributed every year by the mobile network operators. And this application that they put in the SIM cards can work across many different mobile phones and terminals. So the SIM card platform is very interesting for the mobile operators. Now the thing here is that next generation SIM cards will have Java Card 3 and with multichatting with Servlet Engine and will basically be a TCP/IP connected network node.

>> Right. So people are going to be writing a lot more advanced applications in this new generation of SIM cards.

>> Sure. And we also see that we can have sensors directly embedded inside the SIM cards so we can have motion sensors, we can have a WiFi radio directly inside the SIM card.

>> Right.

>> So the idea basically with this PlaySIM platform is that we want to have a platform where every developer can help us and find out what we can do with next generation SIM cards. So the idea is basically that you take your own SIM card, you insert it into the playSIM board and then you take the playSIM board and add it on top on the SunSPOT platform. And what that basically enables is to have a SunSPOT that acts as a SIM card. So we can basically put Java Card 3 applications on the SunSPOTs and they have access to motion sensing. They have access to wireless networking. And we are basically able to experiment with SIM cards that can communicate directly.

>> Right. And this is with SIM cards that are actually live in a phone as opposed to just emulators of SIM cards.

>> Sure.

>> And you get to use all the debugging facilities that come with the SunSPOT. I mean, people in general have not been able to set breakpoints in live SIM cards. And with this, they can.

>> Yeah. And it also opens the SIM cards to normal developers. You don't have to be a mobile network operator to play with this. You can just take your own SIM card and your own SIM card will be used for the authentication to the mobile network and the rest of the applications are recited in the Java Card 3 environment on the SunSPOTs.

>> So it's kind of hard to see a SIM card doing something, but you guys actually put something together here.

>> Yeah, so what we basically have here is that you have added the PlaySIM board on top of the SunSPOT platform. And you have the SIM card inserted into the PlaySIM board and you have connected it to a normal Sony Ericsson phone. So let us see if we can get this to work.

>> Right, so you've got another cell phone here with another SIM card. And so these are two phones that are going to talk to each other using not using the phone side of things, but using the SIM card.

>> Sure. So here I have a SunSPOT only connected to another phone. And now I can see we're on the AT&T network and we are actually talking to the SunSPOT. And the SunSPOT has allowed us access to the AT&T network. Now I can take this other SunSPOT and I can actually see if I can trigger using the accelemeter inside this SunSPOT, I can trigger a menu on this phone. So let us see if we can get some action on the screen here. It just actually triggered directly from this SunSPOT. There is a short delay here because there is a lot of communication going back and forth there. So now it said, motion detected.

>> Right.

>> That's basically triggered from this device wirelessly. So here we have a platform where we can basically experiment with SIM card embedded sensors. And you can basically, as the SunSPOT platform is an extensible platform, we can put on an add-on board with different features. So we can, for instance, put on an add-on board with GPS. And then we have a GPS-enabled SIM card.

>> Yeah, so the kind of things that people are going to be able to do inside the SIM cards is getting really, really interesting. They're becoming much more debuggable, much more approachable. And this is something that nobody's ever, ever been able to do before. I mean, setting a breakpoint not just in the cell phone, which we've been able to do for a few years.

>> Yeah.

>> But in the SIM card on the cell phone.

>> Sure. And all the communication between the SIM card and the terminal goes via the SunSPOTs. So as a developer on the SunSPOTs, you have complete control of the communication between the SIM card and the mobile phone and you can basically have full freedom to play around.

==== Transcribed by Automatic Sync Technologies ====