With just eight days left until next Wednesday’s iPhone 5 unveiling, Deutsche Telekom-owned T-Mobile telco has begun distributing Nano SIMs to retailers. As you know, theforty percent smallerSIM card standard proposed by Apple has been ratified by the European Telecommunications Standards Institute back in June.
A month later, news reports indicated that European carriers had begunstockpilingsupplies andtestingNano SIMs in partnership with Apple, ahead of the iPhone 5 launch.
Since then, a Nano SIM tray said to belong to thenext iPhonehas been leaked in bothimagesand onvideo. Apple’s phone should become the first mobile device to utilize the new standard, helping mainstream the technology much in the same way the iPhone 4 popularized the Micro SIM standard…
German websiteiFunhas gotten hold of a T-Mobile Germany’s new Nano SIM. The carrier has begun distributing a bunch of Nano SIMs to its retail partners earlier this week.
T-Mobile of Germany has also provided the following notice to its partners (emphasis mine, machine-translated):
Dear partners,
you will receive today a new generation of SIM cards for thelatest generation of smartphones that come in the near future on the market. Sort your SIM card please first not in their cards in hand and give it not out to customers. We will inform you shortly about how to proceed.
Take note that T-Mobile’s Nano SIM push coincides conveniently with an alleged iPhone 5 introduction on next Wednesday,September 12.
Pictured: T-Mobile’s Nano SIM on the left and Micro SIM on the right.
This is what the upcoming Nano SIM tray measures up against the Micro SIM tray on the iPhone 4/4S.
And this is the presumed iPhone 5 Nano SIM tray on video.
Are you looking forward to tiny SIM cards debuting on the next iPhone?
If history is an indication, the move will once more give birth to a cottage industry of SIM cutters to help trim down your existing SIM cards to fit the smaller drawer.
