The SIM Application Toolkit is targeted at phones that do not
yet fall into the "smartphone" category. The network operator can
create small programs for SIMs fairly simply. For example, SAT
could be used to define how communication occurs with a bankcard
that has been inserted into a dual slot phone.
Mobile banking has been the trial application with the strongest
demand for SAT, but mobile e-mail and mobile information services
have also been driving forces behind it.
France Telecom has just launched the second trial phase for
"ItiAchat", a secure mobile e-commerce service. France leads the
world on smart cards and some 35 million are in circulation.
Customer's familiarity with these cards mean that a service like
"ItiAchat", which is very easy to use, is likely to enjoy
widespread acceptance. In this system, customers contact the
merchant, by PC or telephone, and place an order. The merchant
sends an SMS message back with the price to the users' Motorola
StarTAC-D handset, which is equipped with a smart card reader. The
consumer inserts their CB bank smart card and keys in the PIN
number, upon which SMS is used to send details to the merchant and
to one of the partner banks, who handle the payment. This is a neat
m-commerce application, and works because consumers are comfortable
with smart cards, with their bank and with the mobile phone. The
client side of things is implemented on a 32K SIM toolkit card.
A WAP Competitor?
Not really. Although the SIM Application Toolkit is being
heavily pushed by the smart card industry, the wider industry has
already swung behind WAP - in fact, WAP 2.0 will include SAT.
SAT enthusiasts talk about WAP browsers being implemented on SIM
toolkit cards, but this rather ignores the fact that WAP is about
rather more than just a WML browser.
Palm/AvantGo Web Clipping
In the United States the web clipping service for 3Com's Palm
VII handheld device has been very successful. The Palm has a 75%
market share of PDAs in this market. Sites have to be specially
developed, but a number of significant content providers including
AOL Instant Messenger, Amazon.com, UPS, Fedex, Yahoo! and others
have developed real time content for wireless delivery via this
service.
A Palm Query Application, or PQA as they are commonly
called, is a special type of application for Palm VII devices that
allows a user to interact wirelessly with web content. A PQA
exploits the platform it is operating on quite well, by
consolidating static parts of the application and installing that
on the Palm. Links are handled locally wherever possible and only
when content not held locally is referenced is an external HTTP
request made.
Palm content is written in a basic form of HTML. HTML 3.2 in its
entirety is not supported, only a subset - no Shockwave Flash
or frames etc for the Palm VII! Curiously, the resultant set of
supported tags is probably not a million miles away from the WML
tag set - but without the specific support for phone-like
functions.
A WAP Competitor?
Yes. 3Com will be launching Palm.net in Europe this summer, to
provide 'web-clipping' of web content for the Palm VII. Web
clipping may co-exist with WAP in the fragmented US market, but in
Europe it is likely to be superseded, even on the Palm platform, by
WAP-based services.
Recently, the Palm CEO has been quoted as saying that mobile is
not a threat to Palm, but that Palm needs to identify and work with
convergent technologies such as WAP, i-mode, and Bluetooth to
present a major long term force.
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