Thanks for your detailed comments. Let me take your points in order. Take a look at some of the minuscule phones coming out of China - some with dual full-sized SIMs. Indeed, I have a wristwatch phone / MP3 player which takes a regular SIM. Yes, having smaller components will save space, but a couple of millimetres? It's taken years for carriers to agree on a single payment system, or a sensible way to port numbers, or a common widget runtime. What makes you think they'll be able to quickly agree on a standard to share their encryption settings? What happens when one - or several - decide they don't want to be a part of such a consortium? Or decide that they don't want Panasonic phones on their network? The death of customer choice. While the micro SIM was a standard, Apple were the first company to produce a consumer level phone which used it. It would be the same as them using a 2.5mm jack for their headphones. Technically a standard - but one which is rarely used and therefore incompatible with most products which people have. I must correct you here. Apple dictated that all iPhones had to be sold with a data package (certainly from speaking to the European operators I know). With that, in some markets, they made sure that the iPhone had a minimum number of minutes and texts. They wanted to make sure that their experience wasn't disrupted with "bill shock". I'm not saying that's a bad thing - an iPhone without data isn't much of a smart phone - but it does reduce choice. I agree that their OTT play in voicemail and messaging was great - both for themselves and customers. But as the tethering fiasco shows, when carriers and manufacturers collude, it's the customer who suffers. Thanks for commenting. T