RIM, Motorola told Apple they could find a nano-SIM compromise: here it is
Eventually, the committee chairman decided to hold an informal vote by show of hands whether each of the two proposals adequately met the jamming requirement. For the Apple design, seven voting members said it did not, 28 said it did.
Context & Ripple Effects
The nano-SIM fight that opened in March has moved through its escalation phase: Nokia called Apple's first proposal non-compliant with pre-agreed requirements (Nokia's objection) and threatened to withhold 'essential' patents if Apple's design was selected (the patent-licensing threat), while RIM attacked Apple's tactics directly. By early May, Apple had modified its design to address those concerns, setting up a decision this month (the revised proposal).
This report shows the pivot working: RIM and Motorola told Apple a compromise was findable, and an informal show-of-hands vote found 28 of 35 voting members judged the Apple design adequate on jamming against seven who did not. The story travelled across Gizmodo, Engadget, and Phone Arena the same day, reflecting how closely the handset industry was watching the standard-setting process.
First-order effects
- Nokia's leverage shrinks materially: its stated condition for withholding essential patents — selection of Apple's design — now faces a vote track where 28 of 35 members back the Apple approach, forcing a choice between carrying out the licensing threat or absorbing the reputational cost of blocking a near-consensus standard.
- RIM and Motorola shift from public opponents to compromise brokers, which changes the coalition math for any remaining holdouts ahead of the formal committee decision this month.
Second-order effects
- If the formal vote mirrors the informal one, device makers get a single 4FF form factor settled before the next hardware cycle, removing the dual-design uncertainty that had been hanging over SIM tray engineering.
- A resolved standard defuses the patent standoff Nokia set up, since essential-patent licensing terms were explicitly tied by Nokia to which design won.
Third-order effects
- The episode illustrates how a single large vendor can steer an ETSI standard through revision-and-vote cycles rather than outright control — opponents' objections become design-change inputs, and informal votes de-risk the formal one.
- Standards bodies face a structural question the March fight exposed: whether pre-agreed requirements mean much when the deciding mechanism is a show of hands among voting members with commercial stakes in the outcome.
The trend: Mobile component standardization is tilting toward whichever vendor best converts objections into design revisions inside ETSI's voting machinery, with Apple's nano-SIM push as the current test case.