Company looks to mega-success with MegaSIM

M-Systems Flask Disk Pioneers Ltd. expects its new MegaSIM technology to be a blockbuster in the mobile market, the company's CEO said in an interview.

The Israeli company's MegaSIM, a technology that boosts mobile phones' SIM memory cards to provide more customer services, was unveiled earlier this month at the 3GSM World Congress in Barcelona, Spain.

The beefed-up SIM will sport 512 MB of memory, which is 8,000 times more than the standard 64 KB SIM, M-Systems said in a statement. The company also said it expects to introduce a 1 GB card, twice the size of the MegaSIM, by the end of 2006.

The card is the result of a partnership between Oberthur Card Systems, makers of the new SIM, M-Systems, which will provide the platform, and mobile operator Orange, which will be the first company to provide the ½ GB SIM in Europe later this year.

"The SIM will transform the mobile phone into a true multimedia player, capable of securely storing a music library containing up to 125 songs, three full-length movies, or 80 Java games. (It) will enable subscribers to store comprehensive (text message) and e-mail archives, complete with attachments," the company statement said.

The firm has already created a $1 billion market with the invention of the DiskOnKey (now called M-Drive), a portable hard drive, and MobileDiskOnChip (now known as M-DOC), a DiskOnKey for handsets.

"I'm prepared to say that I hope for even more than $50 million (in sales of the MegaSIM) in 2007," M-Systems CEO Dov Moran said via the Israeli business newspaper Globes.

The company has been selling handset processors to six of the world's seven leading manufacturers since 2001.

Copyright 2006 by United Press International

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