NFC Coming To Windows Phones In 2011
|Bloomberg is reporting that they have two sources who have said that NFC will be coming to Windows Phones in 2011. For those who aren’t up to speed, NFC is near field communication. In common terms, it’s a chip that has a short range and lets you do things like make payments wirelessly by passing your phone by a receiver or you can get information about a product or share information. Things like that. The reason this is important is that Android supports NFC and there are strong rumors that the iPhone 5 will support it as well (just as many go against that though) so it’s important that Windows Phones are keeping up with the market. Next year there’s expecting to be an explosion of NFC in the S as more and more phones are NFC capable.
To be clear, Bloomberg is stating that this will comes “in the next version of its Windows Phone operating system” which we presume means Mango since that’s also been called Windows Phone 7.5. Nokia has a strong play for NFC and in their phones and it’s likely that MS and Nokia will work together in bringing this to WP7. Of course, if you’re an early adopter with a current device this won’t impact you as you need the hardware as well.
The last Bloomberg rumor was that the Blackberry Playbook would be able to load Android apps and they were right so let’s hope they get this one too.
via Engadget
Some Hackers have already figured out how to steal credit info from CC’s that have NFC chips on them. They do it by swipping a small device pass your wallet or purse, it’s that easy. Now they’ll have all your passwords too.
Let the Droids and the Phoneys get ripped off, disable that feature!
source, Stan City?
Anyway, NFC is the future, and the not so distant future, whether your phone is capable of letting you use it like the rest of us or not. Glad to hear MS is getting on board, the more the merrier into expediting this into becoming a standard, with or without Apple (preferably with) and not just something in my Nexus S. I hate carrying around a wallet, you know? On the other hand I don’t have a credit card yet. C’mon NFC — even if it means getting ripped off by a method that’s “that easy” like Stan City knows the situation and the future of the situation to be. No, you’re not an idiot or a jerkoff at all, you’ve got the whole thing figured out.
There are two lines of articles I’ve seen. half say that reading the chip is only a part of the process and that there are layers of security built into the NFC code so reading it in a one time pass doesn’t give you enough info to necessarily make a payment. I don’t know or get why, but obviously there are some security fetures if they use thiese things all over Asia and Europe. Anyway, here’s an anti-security article from yesterday: http://www.gadgetmanual.com/still-some-obstacles-for-mobile-payment.html
no idea who is right. My sense is that overall we all would need to think a lot more about our phones if they are that intimiately linked to our accounts though.
Dou@Doug Simmons: Sorry, I’ve been on the road working! This stuff came out months ago, I’m serious about the lack of security this technology brings. Forget to sign off the payment app = trouble, Scammer right behind you at checkout = trouble.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/12/10/nfc_security/
The quickest link I could find.