In more and more devices, smartphones and even some laptops, you can find NFC technology, now little used but with great potential, which everyone can try live. In fact, NFC could be the future of fast payments, a substitute for credit cards, boarding cards, entrance tickets or QR codes. Many new phones have NFC, but especially in Italy practically nobody uses it, although there is no difficulty in doing it, even for private purposes.
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NFC stands for Near Field Communication and is a set of standards that allow smartphones and other devices to communicate via radio signals when they are in the immediate vicinity. NFC is included in many devices, including Android devices such as Nexus 4 and 5, Galaxy S3, S4 and S5, HTC One X and others, then it is also included in Nokia Lumia and many Blackberry devices. The data transfer takes place wirelessly. Android phones have Android Beam, a feature that allows two smartphones to quickly share a web page, contacts, photos, videos or other types of information. Touch two phones (the back) to send a file from one to the other.
File transfers are managed as is done with Bluetooth, but once started, there is no pairing to do, just touch and everything will be automatic.
With applications like Wifi file transfer on Android you can send files from one mobile phone to another using this function.
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Devices with NFC hardware can establish communication with other NFC devices equipped with the same technology.
The name " NFC Tag " identifies the chips that contain information or commands that can be read via the NFC equipped smartphone. The Chip does not need power and can be used as an advanced QR code. To establish an NFC connection, just touch two enabled devices. For example, an NFC payment can be made by passing the smartphone over an NFC tag that gives payment instructions to the phone (which will be connected via an app to the credit card). This type of payment has already been implemented in some parking meters in San Francisco, where you can pay for parking by touching the parking meter with your NFC mobile phone.
Anyone can buy an NFC tag, which are quite cheap and you can configure the action that occurs when the smartphone comes in contact with the NFC tag . For example, if you always put your smartphone in silent mode when you go to sleep, instead of doing it manually every night, you could put an NFC tag on the bedside table so, when you go to bed, you place your smartphone on the tag and this will be automatically set to silent.
You could also create an NFC tag that contains the Wi-Fi network's SSID and password. When people come home, they can touch the NFC chip to connect to the internet, without having to enter passwords manually. It can be stored in an NFC Tag, an Internet address, a Foursquare or Facebook Check In, a contact card, a telephone number, a message, an address or whatever you want.
NFC has a wide variety of other possible uses, including:
- Use similar to the QR code, but faster, where you just need to touch the chip to send information or advertising to your smartphone.
- Boarding passes at the airport;
- Pass for reserved areas;
- NFC car keys;
- Various types of payments;
- Electronic ticket validation.
If you want to try, you can buy adhesive NFC tags that cost a few Euros on Amazon, which can be used for private and non-commercial purposes.
The NFC tag can then be programmed easily using an Android smartphone with the NFC Tools application.
To create events and actions instead you need a different app like NFC Tasks or Trigger.
This is just a snapshot to understand how to use NFC, which is a standard for the transmission of data between neighboring devices, which will have more and more applications in real life, which you shouldn't be afraid of.
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