Robert Triggs / Android Authority
Pick up any modern smartphone, and you know to expect it to support the familiar cast of wireless standards. It’s got to have cellular communication, obviously, as well as Wi-Fi. And right after those two, almost certainly Bluetooth and NFC. Seeing new standards like UWB still struggle to find broad support, it feels all the more impressive just how ubiquitous the others have become.
Just what do you know about these protocols that find a home in so many of the mobile devices we use? Last month at CES, I sat down with Mike McCamon, Executive Director of the NFC Forum, to pick his brain about where NFC is headed next, and why users like you should be excited about it.
How often do you use NFC? 11 votes Every day! Cash is dead. 27 % A few times a month. It's handy for certain things. 27 % Infrequently. I'll use it when I'm forced to. 18 % Not at all. 27 %
More than just payments and passes When we think about NFC, most of us probably go right to mobile payments — if you’ve tapped your phone or smartwatch to a payment terminal in a store, you’ve shared information over NFC. And since then, we’ve seen this expand to transit passes, loyalty cards, and even IDs. Basically, if we have data that we used to store on a card, it’s a probably a smart fit for NFC.
Using NFC in ways like this for so long, you might have developed some false impressions about the tech: it’s only for sending data, it can only handle limited amounts of data, or it’s so short-range that you pretty much have to be touching devices. The truth is, NFC is getting better and more feature-rich all the time, and many of those assumptions are now (or are becoming) wildly inaccurate.
Edgar Cervantes / Android Authority
Like other complicated modern protocols, NFC is always evolving, and periodically the NFC Forum publishes updated specifications that introduce new and improved functionality. The last of those arrived in June, with NFC Release 15. One of the big changes included there lets NFC work over a larger distance — up to 2cm — and critically, without breaking existing compatibility. McCamon tells me that this sort of continuity is a key component of the Forum’s work — with NFC already in everything, nobody wants to be forced to buy new hardware every time the spec changes.
The wireless power solution you never knew about For my money, though, probably the biggest “unknown” feature of NFC is wireless power delivery — it can charge your devices, just like you’re familiar with Qi doing. Considering that NFC is everywhere, why aren’t we using it to charge more of our stuff?
Well, that’s a complicated answer, and McCamon frames it as the consequence of a number of issues, with the biggest probably being power output. Mobile device users can be incredibly demanding when it comes to the power we want out of our charging solutions — the more watts the better, right? Wired solutions are just more capable, charging our hardware in record time, and that’s really pushed our expectations in the direction of immediacy.
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