NFC – Making Life Easy

Amal Ambili — Thu, 25 Aug 2011 10:40:12 +0000

Ever noticed the number of items we carry with us when we go shopping? Our wallet is crammed with cash, credit cards, ATM cards, coupons and loyalty cards; not to forget our mobile phone that is always on hand and never leaves our side even when we are paying for items at the counter. Trying to extract anything from our overloaded wallet while still clutching our mobile phone can be an even more difficult feat. This leaves one wondering how simple shopping would be if we could use, just one object to make all our payments. What if we could use our mobile phone to make payments, instead of different plastic cards, coupons or cash?

With technology advancing at a fast pace, we are almost into an era where we can do just that! In the next five years, we would probably be buying just about anything by simply waving or tapping our mobile phones at the shopping counter.

This technology is called Near Field Communication (NFC) and is expected to create a revolution in coming years. NFC makes it easy to conduct transactions, connect electronic devices and exchange digital content with just a simple touch. This wireless technology allows devices to transfer data over short distances through short waves, a touch or a tap.

The Future of NFC

Market research company, ABI Research estimates that by 2016, eighty-five per cent of point-of-sale (POS) terminals will support near field communication for mobile payments. ABI Research also predicts that the shipment of contactless payment cards will increase from 170 million in 2010 to one billion by 2016.

Although only 10% of today’s POS terminals support contactless payment, it is expected to rise exponentially in the coming months. Some of the latest Android phones in the market already have NFC capabilities. Samsung, Nokia, Motorola are among the mobile companies who have launched NFC enabled smart phones. BlackBerry Bold 9900, RIM’s which hit the market very recently, is another smart phone that supports NFC technology. A list of handsets that support NFC is available at NFC World and Wikipedia.

Consumers in the tech world are now eagerly waiting to see if Apple will also include the technology in their next generation iPhone. Speculations suggest that iPhone 5 will arrive with NFC facility, thus propelling this technology rapidly into mainstream usage.

Early Players Stand to Gain

NFC technology is in its nascent stages now and available only in parts of Asia, Europe and the US. However, analysts predict that NFC will launch in 20 countries within the next 18 months. Sensing NFC’s strong potential growth, mobile network providers, credit card companies and even small companies are actively looking for opportunities to facilitate digital transactions when NFC-enabled phones become widely available.

The two big players who have joined the mobile payment race are Visa Mobile Wallet and Google Wallet. The US also plans to roll out a number of NFC-enabled services for customer-facing applications such as mobile banking, mobile payments, transportation initiatives etc. The Android app store already has a small but growing list of NFC-capable apps including those for restaurant coupons, creating and reading NFC tags, NFC widgets, and others. Very recently, the Museum of London has also introduced NFC-based interactive service provided by Nokia’s NFC Hub.

It is certain that in the coming months, more and more NFC capable devices and apps are going to hit and dominate the market. This would be is the right time for businesses to adapt to this new technology and gear up for the fast approaching change.

What iDont, DROID does?

Mahadevan Sreenivasan — Mon, 16 Nov 2009 06:41:39 +0000

Over the years since Apple released its iPhone, many other manufacturers have come up with handsets that were supposed to become ‘iPhone Killers’. None has succeeded so far to say the least. From what we have seen so far, the Motorola DROID can be a serious contender to the crown of the iPhone 3GS. Both phones are available from their respective carriers at $199 with contracts. So the battle will be fought not in terms of price, but in terms of specs and overall usability of the devices.

Internals

The DROID runs on Arm Cortex A8 CPU 550 MHZ processor, 256MB of RAM, and 512MB of ROM. The CPU is actually 600 MHZ but it has been under-clocked at 550 MHZ. Reason for this could be battery life and over heating. There are system level applications available to clock it out at 800 MHZ but it will compromise the battery life heavily. From the initial responses it seems the Android 2.0 OS will help DROID utilize the full potential of this processor. One of the features of the DROID being hyped by Verizon is in fact its ability to switch between multiple applications at run-time – true multitasking. With this processor, there are reports that the DROID will be the fastest Android device on the market.

One important difference between the iPhone and DROID is that the iPhone comes with internal memory of 8GB, 16GB and 32GB variants with no provision of adding a SD card. The DROID has a standard internal memory but supports SD cards up to 32GB. One drawback compared to iPhone is that DROID provides only a meager 256 MB for application storage. Google does not support directly installing apps into the SD card, which largely limits the developers while deploying their products. This is a problem when it comes to graphics / game development which typically takes up a lot of space. It is also like a paradox because Google has introduced APIs for 3-D graphics and OpenGL libraries with the release of Android 2.0. Developers can however store app resources in the SD card similar to Windows Mobile development.

Touch and Feel

The screen on the DROID is a 3.7-inch capacitive touch screen (unlike the resistive iPhone / Blackberry screens) that showcases a full glass display with WVGA resolution at a handsome 480 x 854 pixels. The responsiveness on the DROID due to the capacitive touch is better than most of the other smart phone counterparts. For example gestures and flicks are registered with little to no lag. Whether that can be attributed to Moto’s screen technology, Android 2.0 improvements, or just the speedy CPU inside the DROID is anyone’s guess, but that certainly won’t let the phone down. Another advantage to having that big screen is seeing webpages how they’re meant to be viewed, and browsing on the DROID is certainly a solid experience.

The phone comes with a huge touchscreen with multi-touch but still has space for an actual hardware keyboard. It is just slightly thicker than the iPhone at 0.5 inches but manages to pack a full QWERTY keyboard, which makes it the thinnest QWERTY keyboard mobile available in the market. The only comparison that can come in its way is the Nokia N97 but it too can’t match up with its huge screen and its interface offered by Motorola and Google.

Camera

Google has made some pretty major improvements to the camera application in Android 2.0. This includes more control over white balance, focal length, flash settings, and effects. To complement this Motorola has smartly outfitted the DROID with a 5 megapixel camera coupled with an LED flash. However many initial users claim that the camera is painfully slow to focus and take a snap.

Video

The performance of video capture and playback, on the other hand, is astounding. The DROID is capable of shooting at a 720 x 480 resolution, producing viewable if not totally shake-free video. The phone definitely proves to be better in this department than with stills. The phone also comes with a HDMI port for High Definition Video. However with a resolution of 720 x 480 pixels, the full exploitation of the HDMI support is worth questionable.

Software

Android 2.0 addresses some important changes to the smart phone scene including Google Navigator, voice improvements and more. Google is in fact taking a pro-active approach at improving the platform, along with the opportunity to sync multiple Exchange and/or Google Accounts. The DROID is the first phone to come with Google Maps Navigation, which provides free, turn-by-turn, spoken driving directions.Verizon will sell a car mount for the DROID, as well completely eliminating the need of third party navigation devices like Garmin. The combination may make the DROID the best GPS phone on the market. But what really makes the software a complete win is something completely invisible – APIs. Google has added account/contact/sync APIs that will greatly improve the platform, and inherently the phone’s capabilities over time.

Browser

Mobile internet browsing is another interesting feature of this handset. The browser is of top quality supporting Flash and HTML 5. Google has promised to support Flash 10 from 2010.

Connectivity

DROID comes with a EVDO rev A on-board card for super fast 3G connectivity on Verizon Wireless. There is support for GPS, WiFi, Bluetooth 2.1 + EDR and a USB 2.0 port. The speed of connectivity is observed to be a notch higher than the iPhone 3GS.

Battery

The system comes with a 1400 mAh removable battery which is not bad at all but we expect that it won’t deliver the rated 270 hours standby time or 6 hrs 25 min talktime, especially comparing it to the previous CLIQ. However Motorola has managed to provide a decent talktime of around 5 hrs 30 min, thanks to the somewhat ironic under-clocked CPU!

Final Word

Overall, the DROID is a nice phone and joins the ranks of one of the best smartphones that are available in the market today. However, it’s a mixed bag on whether this handset could really usurp the iPhone as the best performing smartphone on the market. Nonetheless, DROID is a formidable competitor of the current top performing smartphones on the market, and there is a serious competition just getting under way between the different supported mobile OS’s.

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NFC – Making Life Easy

What iDont, DROID does?