Why You Can’t Use Your Phone’s SIM in the iPad | Hacker News Reader

Why You Can’t Use Your Phone’s SIM in the iPad

wired.com

34 pointspixelcort25 comments

When the SIM card size we have now was introduced everyone had to cut them down (SIM cards were as big as your normal credit card back then). You could buy special cutters. No big deal.

I also have no doubt whatsoever that the next iPhone will use a micro sim card.

Unless the point is to stop you putting your iPhone SIM into the iPad.

Wanna bet? :)

No one wants to swap SIMS back and forth between two devices constantly. People will Jailbreak their iPhone and enable the built-in tethering support or use a third party wifi tether app.

I'm still not sure why everyone desires 3G so badly. Even when you have a great signal it isn't particularly fast. WiMax service is finally available in several areas. This is what I was hoping for.

Dunno about the U.S., but over here I was able to play a MMORPG over a 3G connection reasonably well while my regular cable connection was being fixed following an electrical fire. The latency was a bit high, but survivable, and in many uses latency is a negligible factor. It is certainly a viable option for browsing and various other things.

I've played warcraft over 3g in the US. It's alright.

3G is pretty fast, a lot of people think it's slow because the iphone is so slow at rendering pages in Safari, and there's a high latency on each image request.

3G is plenty fast in many parts of the world. For surfing the web it generally feels as fast as using wifi to my adsl connection at home. For large downloads it's obviously slower, but seeing 1Mbit down isn't uncommon on good days. Also I can get a good 3G connection at my small cabin by the coast (where I don't even get warm water or indoor plumbing), I doubt I'll be seeing WiMax out there (and similar places) anytime soon.

Watching a page download is slow. 3G is that slow. It's ok for apps but for full webpage browsing, horrible. Don't know how people can stand it?

Where I live, 3G has minorly more latency and 2MBit down. And the only reason it isn't 7Mbit down (as fast as my home connection) is because I have an iphone 3G vs a 3GS. Alot of the 3G browsing slowness is from the smartphone web browser being slow vs. the actual connection itself. It's alot more zippy for me to browse the web tethering to my laptop than it is on my phone.

Here in Canada Rogers already rolled out 21MB/S on its network. I've seen speed test performed, and people are genuinely getting near this figure, and better than my 14MB/S home connection.

In my experience the apparent speed of 3G is strongly device dependent. When I tether my phone to my laptop it feels much, much faster then when I browse the web directly on my phone. So you are actually watching the page render not download.

the way I (and many of my friends) plan to use the iPad we just dont want or need 3G - to me it feels like something to flog a more expensive version.

This might actually spoil my plans to buy an iPad. I usually won't need 3g coverage on it, but being able to throw in a sim for a road trip or whatever was a huge plus for me. Enough to pay the extra for the 3g model at least.

I remember shaving down multiple headphone connectors with my pocketknife so I could use them in my original iPhone. A normal headphone jack was probably the biggest selling factor for the 3G for me. Ugh, curse apple and their beautiful products.

How long until you get a product/service that cuts your old SIM to the micro SIM size and gives you an adapter so you can continue to use it in your cell phone?

Or just clones the old SIM and writes out the data to a blank micro SIM.

How would one go about doing this? Isn't all subscriber information locked?

I was thinking along the lines of how the iPhone was first unlocked using blank sims. Older sims had a vulnerability that allowed the key to be easily bruteforced. Unfortunately, it appears that newer cards have not been cracked yet, and can't be duplicated. I haven't been keeping up with this :)

It seems clear that this was a negotiation point for AT&T to create artificial lock-in on the 3G service, in return they were willing to go month-to-month.

Even if you were able to tether the iPad to the iPhone, AT&T will chart a similar monthly fee. It will be interesting to see if Apple is willing to create separate models to work on CDMA, etc.

The bigger reason why I cannot use my SIM in the iPad is because my networks 3G operates on AWS 1700. Which, thank you Apple, decided to exclude because they're whoring themselves to AT&T and blocking T-Mobile, and in subsequence Wind here in Canada.

Apple uses new standard as opposed to old - same story, different tech

Agreed, this adoption is inevitable and it's preferable to be ahead of the curve than behind. The real issue will be if the next iPhone ships without micro-SIM.

I would also like to see Apple launch a new Touch with 3G.

"I would also like to see Apple launch a new Touch with 3G."

They already have, it's called the iPhone. I think what you really mean is iPhone with no contract data only plan.

Wouldn't it seem likely that a future iPhone will use this new sim format? Would make sense, might force a few folks into the upgrade path.

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