As I said earlier, they want to leverage the advantage they have with apps. If they build the apps. with Flash or some multiplatform API, then they're ceding that advantage.

So of course they want developers to make apps. which are only compatible with the iPhone OS, so that people keep buying Apple products which have all these apps.

If Android had all the apps., would they behave differently? They don't care because they want people to use browsers and Google services which drive search advertising revenues.

Anyways, you will be able to get portable devices with Flash and we'll see if the claims about battery life turn out to be true and whether Flash games and apps. outshine native Android apps.

The first German provider, simyo, offers microSIMs explicitly for the iPad for pre-order: simyo - Prepaid Micro-SIM-Karte für's Apple iPad inkl. Daten-1GB von simyo
Unfortunatley these guys operate on the eplus network which does support HSDPA in few places only, where bandwidth is throttled to 500 KBit/s.

bob (austria) : main_contentpage login

I suppose everyone is going to have to eventually start offering them. Interesting that the microSIM was actually agreed upon as long ago as November 2003:
SmartCardsTrends -

From there this bit is especially interesting:
I really hate the way Apple somehow feels the need to be the launch customer with this rather "tiny" new device of theirs. They couldn't possibly have found a way for it to accommodate a full size SIM could they?

These guys managed: YouTube - WORLD SMALLEST ULTRA MINI TINY MOBILE CELL PHONE U9 ( size of MATCHBOX )

MicroSIMs can be good for watch phones & other small stuff that might become popular someday. I too see it as odd from a technical/physical standpoint that the smallest SIM format is being used in one of the biggest mobile computing devices around.

I'm sure it was done at the request of AT&T so people didn't just take their iPhone SIM and put it in their iPad. But knowing Apple, probably didn't have to ask more than once :)

I think all 3 UK carriers of iPhone announced iPad support. Not sure what the plans they offered were but obviously they would have to offer microSIMs.

The lost prototype iPhone HD had a microSIM slot. So all iPhone carriers may have to offer microSIMs later this year.

We should know in the next couple of weeks when iPad price and schedule are announced for international markets.

Yes, because the US is the only country where Apple sells the iPhone. :)

I haven't seen numbers, but I doubt the US accounts for more than about 1/3 of world iPhone sales. The iPhone is wildly popular in a lot of countries.

I did some googling and it turns out the US was 54% of iPhone/iPod Touch sales as of mid-2009. Still, that leaves a lot of devices.

In France, they will probably have a 30 euro a month plan with a whopping 100 megs of data. Everytime I've looked at prepaid data in France I came to the conclusion that there was a place worse than the US.

By the way, if you look at the Gizmodo leak on the iPhone 4, it also uses a MicroSIM.