Gemalto squeezes Facebook onto a SIM

Gemalto has managed to get Facebook running on a SIM chip, making every GSM phone a Facebook phone and bringing social networking to the dumbest of handsets. The SIM-based client isn't as pretty as its smartphone contemporaries – don't expect picture streams or sliding interfaces – but it was developed with the help of …

[John Smith 19]

Clever architecture

Does anyone use if for anything useful?

[Anton Ivanov]

Have you seen a provider VAS which is remotely useful?

Have you seen a provider VAS which is remotely useful on a GSM network and a long term (2+ years) success?

iMode (Japan cellular system) and Sprint NAV (PCS) do not count.

Guess not...

That more or less answers your question.

Now why do people after 15 years of failure continue rely on VAS as a primary monetisation method and build an entire architecture that will not monetise without VAS (3GPP LTE+IMS) is a different story...

[Kebablog]

Eat more Kebab

I find it useful to see how unproductive some of my relatives are.

[Anonymous Coward]

Not me.

I'm a dumphone owner and I won't be going for this. I reckon anyone who wants to stay that well-connected will have a smarter phone anyway and be FB-ing graphically. There's a reason people use dumphones : they actually want a telephone and nothing else.

[Geoff Campbell]

Not me either, but it isn't aimed at us.

I reckon this is a (quite stunningly clever, actually) play to get into remote third world communities, where smartphones, laptops, and PCs are just a distant dream.

GJC

[Anton Ivanov]

It will be cheaper to have smart phone

SMS is necessarily expensive because it uses signalling bandwidth which is "transactionally safe" on every hop, reliably transmitted, etc. Depending on the radio plan it also usually uses the channel which is otherwise used for signalling.

If every second dumb phone out there will be loading that bandwidth for free (or flat fee) to access F***book the network will run out of signalling capacity in a blink of an eye.

While a good demo of what the SIM toolkit can do an operator doing this instead of going for a F***book enabled phone and GPRS most likely has a suicide wish of sorts.

[Anonymous Coward]

Sounds like a good way to get an infection.

Aren't virii written to use this method to get data into/out of cell phones?

[Shanghai Tom]

Facebook blocked in China

Facebook access ( along with twitter and a few others ) are blocked in China, so I don't see China Mobile agreeing to put facebook on a sim and bypass their own internet firewall!