The European Telecommunications Standards Institute has delayed a vote on a new Sim card standard, in an attempt to reach a broader industry consensus. The ETSI was unable to vote at its meeting on 28-29 March in Sofia-Antipolis, France, after hearing rivals proposals from Nokia and Apple. The next opportunity for a vote will be at a meeting in Osaka, Japan on 31 May-01June. An earlier meeting may be called by the chairman of the ETSI's Smart Card Platform Technical Committee, which has the vote on the matter, but this will require at least 30 days notice to members. According to press reports, both Apple and Nokia are facing problems with securing licensing of the intellectual property needed to build their designs for the new, smaller Sim card. Nokia has threatened to withhold licensing of some of its technology which it says is essential to the Apple design if the ETSI approves Apple's proposal. According to French daily Les Echos, a consortium of Flash memory makers, including Toshiba, Panasonic and SanDisk, is refusing to support Nokia's proposal, in order to preserve the market for their own SD cards.
