Stupid Question 166: What is NFC?

[To celebrate my first year of programming I will ask a ‘stupid’ questions daily on my blog for a year, to make sure I learn at least 365 new things during my second year as a developer]

What is NFC?

I have a new phone for work, a Nokia Lumia 920- and I am loving the phone! The three things I really love, compared to my previous Lumia 800, is the camera (which is amazing), the size (I prefer large phones- had a HTC HD before), and NFC. At TechDays there were quite a few devs there with a Windows Phone, pretty much everybody had one, and I fell in love with the Tap and Send feature, which allows you to send an image by just touching one phone to another. So neat!

I started playing around with NFC after that (so there will be a few blog posts about NFC soon) and made it a thing to show people how it works. But many had no idea what NFC is, hence the question of the day, what is NFC?

NFC stands for Near Field Communication and is a wireless, low-power, low-range radio communication between two devices, or a device and a so-called tag (tags aren’t powered by own battery*). In contrast to smartcards NFC allows two-way communication, and allows you to do task automatisation with pre-planned commands to be executed.

*The tags are powered by the touching device and the emitted radiowaves

Comments

NFC is fantastic, but quite underutilized, undervalued, and heavily debated.
First, because its low-powered, pure NFC data transfer rates are slow, so you would also need to use it in combination with something like WiFi Direct to make sharing things between devices much easier and faster. Its best used as the initiator for large data transfers.
Second, it has the potential to revolutionize payment systems. This is currently a hot topic right now, especially since NFC made its most popular debut with the Android Galaxy Nexus and Google Wallet. I loved Google Wallet on my Galaxy Nexus and made things really convenient, but since financial services like Visa want a bigger piece of the pie, they are making it difficult to use this new tech.
Overall, NFC has a lot of potential, and has definitely made my life easier now that I can share files between my Nexus 7 tablet and Galaxy Nexus phone with just a simple tap. If they built it into more laptops, I'm sure the adoption rate would be a lot faster and more pervasive. 

Last modified on 2013-03-21