Portable case for an electronic smart card

A portable case for receiving an electronic smart card that lies substantially in a plane and that stores information, and for transmitting information to and/or from the card, wherein the case is thin and has a width and length of the same magnitude as that of the card, comprising:

• a casing which has top and bottom walls lying in spaced substantially parallel planes, opposite sides, and forward and rearward ends;
• a circuit board mounted in said casing between said top and bottom walls;
• a card drawer lying in said casing between said circuit board and said top casing wall, said card drawer being slidable in a forward direction to receive a card and being slidable rearwardly to a position where substantially all of said drawer lies between said top and bottom casing walls;
• said drawer has a front crosspiece and opposite side legs, but is substantially devoid of any wall portion that can position said card to orient it parallel to said top and bottom walls, so when said card lies in said drawer its top and bottom are closely sandwiched between said circuit board and said casing top wall, whereby to minimize the thickness of the portable case;
• said casing bottom wall has an upstanding side wall at either side of said casing, and has a rearwardly elongated upstanding partition (90) slightly spaced inwardly from each sidewall, to leave a slideway (34, 36) between each upstanding side wall and an adjacent partition;
• each of said drawer side legs is free of attachment to the other at locations between said partitions, and each of said legs is closely slidably received in a corresponding one of said slideways;
• each of said partitions has an indentation (27) extending in a direction along its length with the bottom of the indentation spaced from said casing bottom wall, and said circuit board has opposite side edges lying in said indentations to thereby space opposite edges of the bottom of said circuit board from said casing bottom wall to leave a space between them.