AT&T Mobility (NYSE:T) is willing to work with Apple (NASDAQ:AAPL) and other industry players to develop a smaller standardized SIM card, a proposal Apple put forward last month.
During an interview with AllThingsD following his appearance last week at the D9 event, AT&T Mobility and Consumer Markets CEO Ralph de la Vega said that AT&T thinks that making the card smaller "is a no-brainer" and he believes that will happen.
France Telecom CEO Stephane Richard made similar comments last month, and said that the European telco is going to work with Apple on standardizing a smaller SIM card that balances operators' needs for security and authentication with Apple's desire to free up more internal space in the iPhone. Apple submitted a request to European Telecommunications Standards Institute in May to standardize a smaller version of the micro-SIM card it already uses in the iPhone 4 and the iPad.
In the interview, de la Vega also touched on the carriers' smartphone lineup and the wider smartphone market in general. He said the company is pleased so far with Microsoft's (NASDAQ:MSFT) Windows Phone 7 platform, but said AT&T will have to take a wait-and-see approach before bringing Nokia (NYSE:NOK) further into the fold. "It hasn't sold as well as Microsoft or us would want it to, but I think having the Nokia hardware capability with the Microsoft software capability is a really good combination," he said. "They have to prove it by bringing some great devices to market. But I would love to have a great Nokia device with Microsoft Windows Phone 7."
The AT&T chief also said he felt, unsurprisingly, that Apple's iOS and Google's (NASDAQ:GOOG) Android platform are the hottest operating systems right now. He said he has been pleased, in particular, with the work of HTC, which supplies both Android and Windows Phone devices to AT&T. De la Vega also said that Research In Motion (NASDAQ:RIMM), which has been battered recently by analysts who are worried about the company's prospects, needs to definitively make its transition to using QNX software for its smartphones.
"I think customers want more applications and they are going to eventually move to where they have one OS. Right now they have OS 7 and they have QNX," he said, adding, "We don't necessarily scale back. We offer their full product line. We just see customers, in some cases, choosing other products rather than traditional BlackBerries."
For more:
- see this AllThingsD article
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