NEW YORK-Motorola Inc. plans to begin trials in Europe late this year of CardFone, which it hopes will be the first handset available commercially to give users access both to automated teller machine (ATM) capabilities and conventional wireless telecommunications.
“We are basically taking the momentum of the smart-card industry’s electronic purse and marrying it with cellular,” said Joachim Hoffmann, director of mobile commerce for the Motorola Cellular Subscriber Group-Europe, Middle East and Africa, headquartered in Hampshire, United Kingdom.
Operating under non-disclosure agreements, Motorola is involved in discussions with numerous wireless carriers about deployment and marketing of its CardFone, said Hoffmann and Barbara A. Jankowski, head of public relations for the company’s U.K.-based Cellular Subscriber Group.
In the spring, the company made public the CardFone prototype, saying then it was the first of its kind by any manufacturer. Motorola plans to begin selling the phones commercially sometime next year, Hoffmann said.
Under consideration are manufacturing locations for the new handset. Motorola is leaning toward producing them at its plants in Germany and the United Kingdom, but it also may decide to produce some in the United States, he said.
Based on the StarTAC model, the new Motorola CardFone for Global System for Mobile communications will be a “two-slot” wireless communications device. In addition to the tiny, conventional subscriber identity module used for customer authentication and billing in GSM phones, the handset will be able to read a credit card-sized SIM card to access third-party ATM services.
The vision for Motorola’s CardFone is one of convenience for consumers, who would be able to download cash equivalents into their phone’s smart card and make purchases of goods and services, such as entertainment, transportation, financial products, even wireless telephony. That day isn’t quite here yet, but it is coming, Hoffmann said.
Although certain standards are in place for ATM cards, “at the moment, we don’t have a universal purse,” Hoffmann said. “It comes down to commercial agreements to accept payments and do clearing. We believe more unification will happen.”
Data speeds in wireless are another issue. Today, “reaction times are still tolerable, considerably under five minutes,” he said. Tomorrow, driven by consumer pressure, carriers likely will upgrade their networks to circuit-switched data or other, faster technologies.
Meanwhile, the recent introduction of Java and the SIM Application Toolkit have created new, open standards for wireless telephony. They have enabled introduction of “super-smart SIMs [with] the ability to store and run additional programs using the phone as a slave to access and download information,” a Motorola news release said.
The next step, which Motorola plans to take with its CardFone, is to use the handset for electronic commerce. Security is essential for the success of this new suite of applications.
The CardFone “offers a way to authenticate and verify transactions via a dedicated [Personal Identification Number] backed by existing smart card security features developed by the likes of Visa, MasterCard, American Express and others, as well as the security and encryption of GSM networks,” Motorola said.
