So, unless you’ve been living under a rock for the past few years you have certainly had a phone and a phone number attached to it as well. You probably used this phone to contact your friends and your family because, well, that is the purpose of phones! Certainly, you used a regular size SIM card on your phone to identify your phone number and to store some information.
SIM Card
But things are now changing and your normal SIM card is now going to become obsolete in the next few years, provided you actually change your phone to a new one sometime in the future. What’s happening is that the SIM cards are getting smaller and smaller.
Micro SIM
First, came the micro SIM card which was basically a cut version of the regular SIM card. Its usage is now starting to spread over a lot of new phones because of the obvious advantage of it being smaller, allowing the phones to use precious space inside of them for other important things.
Nano SIM
But as technology advances, things keep on getting smaller, and the same thing happened with SIM cards. Apple has announced the release of the iPhone 5 along with the era of the nano SIM card.
What is Different Between SIM Cards
The micro SIM card was basically a cut version of the regular SIM card, and as such, it was around half the size of it, measuring around 0.6” in length and around 0.5” in width. For example, the iPhone 4 now uses the micro SIM, and it does not accept the regular SIM card. Even though they are even smaller, they now have a very big downside to them.
These cannot be cut out of the micro SIM card with ease, because they are also less thick than the regular SIM card (and as such, less thick than the micro SIM card). The nano SIM card is 40% smaller and it measures around 0.5” in length and 0.3” in width.
Back when the iPhone 5 was released, the availability of the nano SIM card for people that bought the iPhone was an issue, but nowadays the nano SIM card is as widespread as the micro and the regular SIM card.
What Are The Key Differences
To summarize, the big difference between these two is the size, and when it comes to SIM cards, it really does matter. IT matters mainly because now some phones can’t handle a regular SIM card, and others can’t even handle the micro SIM card. As technology keeps on advancing, it seems that these cards are just getting smaller and smaller and who knows, some day, these might even be so small that we won’t really need to see them at all – some machine will put them into our phone for us.