Near Field Communication (NFC) is a hot topic in the mobile world right now, with the prospect of making micro-payments or transferring all manner of useful info simply by waving your phone at a reader quite rightly getting people fairly excited. As you’d expect, Nokia is at the forefront of NFC’s development through handsets like the Nokia C7, and has been for years. We reveal more after the cut.Look at any guide to emerging technology on sites covering the smartphone industry and you’re likely to see some mention of NFC in there. Indeed, just last week research firm Juniper Research said 20 per cent of all smartphones would be NFC-enabled by the year 2014.
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Now, one in five may not seem like an awful lot – until you consider that it actually equates to around 300 million smartphones around the world.
The science of NFC is fairly complex, but in layman’s terms it simply refers to the transfer of data over very short distances between two NFC-enabled devices. One of the best-known practical applications is the Oyster Card system used by the London public transport network, where swiping the NFC-capable card over a reader sees your account debited automatically with the cost of your journey.
Mobile phones have long since been seen as a natural home for the technology, offering not only the potential of making small payments through an account linked to your SIM card, but also opening the door to added-value features such as movie trailers or discount vouchers that can be viewed by swiping a code in a magazine.
But while many mobile phone makers are only now taking their first steps with the technology, Nokia has been making NFC-capable phones for years.
As far back as 2005, the Nokia 3220 appeared featuring a NFC-modified back cover, followed a year later by the similarly NFC-capable Nokia 5140. But those largely just represented Nokia dipping a toe into NFC waters, and it was only in 2007 that Nokia took the plunge fully with the Nokia 6131 NFC.
Over the past four years both the Nokia 6131 NFC and the similarly capable Nokia 6212 classic have been used in NFC trials everywhere from Frankfurt to Bangalore, and clearly Nokia has mastered the technology from a phone manufacturer’s point of view.
However, the widespread adoption of NFC requires not only the technology to be built into handsets but also for the infrastructure to be put in place that uses it, and that’s the real reason why ‘only’ 20 per cent of phones will have NFC capability among their features by 2014.
We’re willing to take a bet, though, that a good percentage of those 300 million phones will be Nokias. The Nokia C7, for instance, is NFC-enabled, and we’re certain it’ll be joined by plenty more in the Nokia stable in future – just as soon as the rest of the mobile industry catches up.
What do you make of NFC, and what application of the technology are you most excited about? Give us your thoughts in the Comments below.
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