
Next-gen iPhone, iPad expected to get Near Field Communications - evo_9
http://arstechnica.com/apple/news/2011/01/apple-expected-to-finally-add-nfc-to-ipads-and-iphones-this-year.ars
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brianwillis
Funny how history doesn't really repeat itself, but it does speak in rhyme.

This is how paypal started out. You'd run a paypal app on your Palm Pilot
(remember those?) and you'd use it to pay people electronically device-to-
device, "beaming" cash over the infrared port.

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jjcm
With the McDonalds restaurants in Europe getting NFC for payment processing,
this might actually work this time around. I have my doubts, yes, but with
Apple behind it the technology might get a push as being a trendy thing
socially.

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sambeau
I could really see this taking off in London if you could use it as an Oyster
Card:

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oyster_card>

On a personal note I also use an RFID to unlock the front door to my apartment
block and to set the alarm at work. If I could clone them onto my iPhone I
could lose two of the three things in my wallet. If I could pay with it too
I'd have no need for a wallet (I already keep photos of my kids and a PDF scan
of my Driving License in my Dropbox).

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guelo
Is this the first technology to appear first on Android and then be copied to
iPhone? If so it is good news as it means that we have a truly competitive
market.

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Kylekramer
Well, multitasking and folders are an earlier example. Of course, I am of the
opinion we had a competitive market in quality for about a year now. And that
sales markets often have very little to do with quality.

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karanr
Why limit the thought to simply monetary transactions? What about
communications with other types devices. Inventory management at warehouses,
package sorting by shipping companies, communication with other consumer
devices. Your phone will become the data hub. New business models can be
derived... the possibilities are endless.

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evgen
There are some practical limitations on NFC that make this unlikely. The
difference between NFC and RFID is that RFID used backscatter for transmitting
information while NFC uses induction, with the latter you get an inverse
square drop-off in the communications link as distance increases. The range
for NFC is unlikely to get beyond 10-20cm while RFID can be read over a
hundred meters or so given the right equipment.

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thinkcomp
There's really an enormous amount of hype around NFC, and the fact is that the
readers are still really expensive. We've been operating on the assumption
that barcodes will prevail because they're about 10X cheaper to read, and the
recent Starbucks nationwide rollout of barcode-based mobile payments supports
that.

Also unless I'm missing something the Android 2.3 NFC spec is pretty
incomplete. It lets you read an NFC tag with a phone but not broadcast as
though your phone were a tag. This means that you can't really do mobile
payments after all (again, I might be missing something obvious, but I don't
think so). Hopefully if this really is an omission it will get resolved with
the next release of Android. For now there's not a whole lot we can do with
it.

Anyway, NFC is great, but in reality scanning a barcode isn't that much harder
or faster, and it's certainly cheaper--it's been working at grocery stores for
years.

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evgen
The difference between NFC and barcodes or RFID is that the former uses
induction between the tag and reader and the tag can modulate the signal it is
returning. In short, two-way communication between tag and reader and not just
one-way data delivery. The current Android spec is only half of a NFC solution
but most of the rumors so far indicate that Apple is going the full distance
and the new hardware will be able to act as both a tag and a reader. If this
turns out to be true then there are a lot more possibilities that this will
open up.

