Jump back 10 years – 2001 and a new phone is announced: The Nokia 3330 (remember it?), the upgrade to the 3310; the biggest difference was that it was WAP enabled. The 3330 is one of the top five best selling phones of all time, selling over 100 million units.
So in 10 years, we have moved from WAP to EDGE, 3G and now looking at 4G. Not only have there been huge improvements in the area of internet connections, but other noteworthy add-ons have been GPS, Infra-Red, Wi-FI and Bluetooth (none of which the 3330 had).
Well now there is another to add to the list of what a cellphone is able to do. Although not a brand new technology, the potential is quite something… Near field communication (NFC), has been around (as far as I can tell) since 2005, and it is exactly as the name suggests: communication between devices that are near to your device. Yes, you are probably thinking “well isn’t that what we have infra-red (if you still use it) and the more common Bluetooth for? A question rightly asked, and yes NFC is similar to these, probably more like infra-red since it has a data transfer rate of 424 Kb/s over a distance of less than 20 cm (some say closer to 4cm).
So let’s get this clear: a new technology that is slower than older ones and has to be closer in order to work, well that doesn’t sound like much of an improvement, does it!? But there are specific reasons for it being this way; you see the focus of NFC is in the area of using your phone to pay for a variety of things, from purchases in a shop to buying tickets for transportation. And with this you can see why the working range is so close: if the range was larger, you would run the risk of others being able to intercept your payments – not so good; the smaller the range, the more secure. A big benefit of NFC is that it takes less that 1 second to configure: bring the two NFC devises close to each other and with almost immediate effect they are ready to send and receive data.
NFC is not limited to payments: you are able to transfer data such as images from one device to another. Also, get ready to see advertising take on a new twist with small advertising boards having NFC chips in them that your phone will be able to read. The advert will be transferred onto your phone (if you accept), or a link to a web page.
Some phones that are NFC enabled include the Google Nexus S and the Motorola L7 (SLVR). The next Apple iPhone is also rumoured to be NFC enabled.
So this seems like the way to go, but I wouldn’t throw away my bank card just yet.
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