When designing smartphones, what we’ve noticed is how they smartphone makers tend to try and strike a balance between packing a ton of features, a larger battery, new sensors, and also trying to keep the phone as slim and as light as possible. Over the years we’ve seen this achieved by removing certain components like the headphone jack, reducing the size of SIM cards, and so on.
However in the future it seems that phones may no longer need to use external physical SIM cards as it could be built into the phone itself, or at least that’s what ARM is hoping to accomplish. They have recently announced new technologies that could see future ARM-based chips come with built-in SIMs, which means that the traditional SIM card slot in our phones could be used for something else or done away with entirely.
As ARM points out, this isn’t just limited to phones because it could also be applicable to non-mobile devices that use ARM-based chips. It could also be used in IoT devices where the built-in SIM will allow for it to become more connected than ever. As it stands there are some devices that already deploy similar technology.
This includes Apple’s iPads in which the cellular version has built-in SIM, and the Apple Watch Series 3 which also comes with its own built-in SIM. Also considering that a fair number of chipsets used by mobile devices are based on the ARM architecture, we wouldn’t be surprised if more mobile devices in the future could come with built-in SIMs.
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