Good artical but it seems to leave out the fact that smart card may be being leap frogged by i-phones and assocoated apps.These are replacing the need to carry any type of plastisc card (see the i-wallet)..Be it smart card or mag stripe cards. It is sad to say that it looks as though cards have no great future. Iam sure right now somewhere someone is writing a app for a fundraising card that you can buy and store on your phone...no need to carry the card. Does not matter the function of the card it can be put on a phone or electronic devise.

Reports that the O/S debate has "cooled" may be true in some regions ... but are in full scale battle in the contactless (13.56 MHz) arena - and especially in the Campus Card world (colleges, universities, community colleges, boarding schools, hospitals, healthcare, corporate campuses). Twenty years ago we saw nearly every card vendor and systems integrator promoting their proprietary O/S - perhaps hoping they would become the next Microsoft. For over 50 years, the security system and copier vendors have sought to require their own proprietary media or formats for use in their specific systems. Twenty years ago the "contact" smart card vendors continued that tradition which resulted negatively in confusing the market and causing most potential customers to simply sit on the sidelines. Unfortunately, many of today's "contactless" multi-application smart card providers and integrators are once following that failed strategy. Potential customers are once again milking their legacy systems. They are delaying adoption of more advanced credential technology - because they don't want to get stuck with "...that BETA technology." The wars between the family of Mifare siblings vs. the "new and improved" iCLASS are raging hotter than ever. But rather than integrating several O/S lines into their systems, the system vendors are aligning themselves to only one O/S - even abandoning their customers with previously supported products. Other vendors are simply burying their heads in the sand by only promoting mag stripe or antiquated prox technology. The O/S wars may have cooled down on Venus, but are ongoing and in fact escalating on Mars.

Robert C. Huber, CMC Campus Card Business Consultant

The key problem with JavaCard OS is that it's finally been exposed as being too slow for many applications. Many developers are hiding this by implementing proprietary speed-important functions on silicon, thus achieving better performance at the expense of defeating the touted advantages of JavaCard. Also the cost of cards using either JavaCard or proprietary OS is too expensive for many high-volume applications, who are now reverting to using cheaper off-the-shelf cards with "good-enough" OS.

JavaCards born with only simetric key to authenticate and so to encrypt applications to be loaded, so the middleware (devices and all software in the middle) had to "touch" the key being a high unsecure approach. Multos born with a PKI being possible to encrypt application per card or per group card. It's was a big deal to choose Multos instead JavaCard, for systems that needs application load dynamicaly (on the field). But today JavaCard also have assimetric keys that can be used on application loading.