Apple partners with Gemalto on custom SIM card
The blogsphere is spinning this as the mothership cutting European carriers out of the loop. However, if you were a carrier and Apple offered to relieve you of thankless hassles of iPhone activation, would you hate the idea?
GigaOM claims — yup, this is a rumor — that Apple and SIM-card manufacturer Gemalto to create a special SIM card that will allow iPhone buyers to activate their devices either at the Apple Store or at home using the iTunes App Store.
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- Customers will then be able to choose their carrier at time of purchase at the Apple web site or retail store, or buy the phone and get their handset up and running through a download at the App Store as opposed to visiting a carrier store or calling the carrier. Either way, it reduces the role of the carrier in the iPhone purchase.
This could turn the carriers into faceless organizations whose only contact with users is a monthly bill. Is that necessarily a bad thing?
Well, as an old friend of mine who was the chief admin at a mid-90s dial-up ISP once said, “Our system is perfect except for the damned users.”
Carriers, in Europe at least, just might be ready to act on that sentiment and off-load a big part of the often fractious customer relationship business to Apple. Why not?
via MacRumors
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