With all the hullabaloo going 'round about Cingular's increasing
involvement in
NFC trials, it seems like it's in manufacturers' best interests to start pumping out phones that can do the duty (read: GSM 850 and 1900 radios, please). Nokia's first to answer the call with an NFC-enabled version of the standard-duty
6131 clamshell, aptly named the 6131 NFC. An
N76 it's not, but it still gets the job done with FM radio, microSD expansion, Bluetooth, and a 1.3 megapixel cam -- and, of course, that all-important NFC hardware for quick payments, wireless contact info exchange, or whatever nifty use cases the NFC folks can dream up. The 6131 drops this quarter for around $340 before carrier (and when we say "carrier," we think we probably mean "Cingular") subsidies.
posted Jan 8th 2007 12:30PM
Great so if someone steals my phone they can go on a shopping spree.
When people make purchases with CCs, it takes 7 to 10 days to recover a CC. Banks loose big time on that. Bad guys know how long it takes and make big use of stolen CCs during the 2nd to 4th day. Then sell them, down the food chain. Last one holding gets the cop.
Now a Cell Phone CC is different. It takes 10 min. to shut down the CC feature, leaving someone with just a cell phone. No number and no PIN.
What's in your wallat? I mean cell phone?
The 6131 NFC not only supports Bluetooth, which enables you to write programs and deploy them Over The Air, but also some more interesting technologies for businesses such as the Web Services API (JSR-172) and the Scalable 2D Vector Graphics API.
These allow you to interact with any existing webservice at very low cost, and display images that can be scaled infinitely - meaning your MIDlet will have smoothly scaled images with every possible screen size.
http://danielsweblog.blogspot.com/2007/01/nokia-releases-new-6131-nfc-phone.html
Love the comment on losing the phone, but with encrypted smart card applications, most finders of the phone will find it useless to use for purchases. First, there is no infrastructure yet. Second, Nokia has no orders for these phones, and the operators will not order until the SWP issue is sorted [single wire protocol]. NFC is dead in its tracks because the business models and standards are another 1-2 years away.
About the infrastructure, there are operators that already have transaction systems running in production, that only need to be modified slighty in order to work with NFC.
You can patch your cash register's software to support NFC, and for instance could use the existing credit card infrastructure.
If such a big consortium of big names is behind NFC, how could you say it's dead in its tracks?