Android to support near field communication

Tim Finin, 10:28pm 15 November 2010

As TechCrunch and others report, Google’s Eric Schmidt announced that the next version of Android (Gingerbread 2.3) will support near field communication. What?

Wikipedia explains that NFC refers to RFID and RFID-like technology commonly used for contactless smart cards, mobile ticketing, and mobile payment systems.

“ Near Field Communication or NFC, is a short-range high frequency wireless communication technology which enables the exchange of data between devices over about a 10 centimeter (around 4 inches) distance.”

The next iphone is rumored to have something similar.

Support for NFC in popular smart phones could unleash lots of interesting applications, many of which have already been explored in research prototypes in labs around the world. One interesting possibility is that this could be used to allow android devices to share RDF queries and data with other devices.

Categories: Google, Mobile Computing, Pervasive Computing, RFID Comments: 3

3 Responses to “Android to support near field communication”

Tadpole Says:
November 15th, 2010 at 11:00 pm
I see a lot of security concerns with such a feature. Developers will have to be far more security conscious than they typically are.
Ian Says:
November 16th, 2010 at 10:02 am
I would be all for interesting applications, but I note that Palm devices supported this over infrared for something like 10 years and no interesting applications really ever emerged.
App developers Says:
November 17th, 2010 at 4:21 am
The world really becomes more and more narrow place. Could we imagine anything like that 15 years ago? No. And the main point is that everything is made for people’s use and for saving time!
But the only question I have is whether this NFC systems will be safe, especially when we deal with mobile payment systems. There are some problems with the security that Android has…