It’s been a little over a year since the Samsung Nexus S hit shelves as the first smartphone with NFC in the US. Since then, a handful of other manufacturers have released devices with NFC on board, but overall NFC hasn’t seen any significant adoption in the US.
The tech savvy among us see the usefulness of NFC, especially in smartphones, but there’s very little reason for the average consumer to be excited about NFC yet. In my personal experience, when you can reach out and show someone what can be done with NFC, there is a real excitement brewing. Now, if there was only a mobile platform where the hardware has been nearly identical for two generations, making it very easy to just make an inexpensive sleeve to add NFC to the platform… Oh, hey Apple, what brings you by?
Because the external dimensions of the iPhone 4 and iPhone 4S are identical (and cases built for one work with the other), all you would need is a case to stick the phone in with an NFC chip and an NFC antenna built in, and you’d be good to go, right? This year at CES, the guys at NXP Semiconductors had a demo of a case for the iPhone that added NFC to the device, making it so all you need is the sleeve and an app and your iPhone would have NFC.
The NXP Semiconductors team will be bringing their NFC-enabled iPhones to Mobile World Congress this year as well, with a few demonstrations on how the iPhone could benefit from NFC. The catch? NXP can’t sell the case to anyone until Apple has cleared it. Until Apple has approved it for retail, the NXP Semiconductors prototype will remain exactly that.
The demonstration of the sleeve at CES showed that it was just about as functional as if NFC had been built into the handset. The only real limitation was the need to have the NXP app open when you waved your phone over an NFC tag. Otherwise, exactly the same as native hardware — you could still write tags and have those tags execute commands.
With any luck, Apple will allow these sleeves to hit shelves soon, so iPhone users and developers would be able to grow the NFC ecosystem exponentially.
Source: www.geek.com
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