Samsung, one of the largest vendors of NFC-enabled mobile phones, unveils their new ‘Wallet’ app: When we asked why Samsung did not include NFC tap-to-pay features in Wallet, the company said that retailers prefer barcodes over NFC because they don’t have to install any new infrastructure to support it. The failure of NFC adoption summed [...]
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The first NFC appliance
Nokia has announced the Play 360°, a portable speaker that on the surface looks like a fairly ordinary bluetooth-enabled, battery powered speaker system. The interesting bit is that this is the first appliance (that I can buy in a shop) that does things when touched with a mobile phone: The NFC interaction is demonstrated first-hand [...]
Google, Android and NFC
Alongside the persistent rumours of an Apple iPhone with an RFID/NFC reader (and our own experiments with iPhone NFC interactions) it seems that Google is really beginning to push for NFC as part of its Android operating system and hardware guidelines. In the recent “Conversation with Eric Schmidt” with John Battelle and Tim O’Reilly at [...]
Wireless in the world
An ongoing Touch theme is about making invisible wireless technologies visible, in order to better understand and communicate with and about them (see a Graphic Language for RFID, Dashed lines and Fictional radio spaces). Right now I am sitting near fourteen objects sending and receiving radio signals, from Oyster cards to mobile phones and wireless [...]
Early visualisations of cellular networks
I happened to catch the American-centric documentary history of the mobile phone called The Cellphone Revolution yesterday. The most compelling content was the early visualisations of cellular networks, made by Motorola and AT&T at the time that they were trying to convince the FCC that mobile telephony was important. It also features rather nice footage [...]
Thoughts on Nokia’s NFC developments
On April 15th Nokia announced the 6212 ‘classic’ phone that incorporates Near Field Communication technology. This phone is the fourth NFC-capable phone from Nokia in as many years and it is the first NFC device that supports 3G data connections. This is a simple ‘classic’ or ‘candybar’ design like the earliest NFC models. Nokia has [...]
Three papers on mobile payments
The weblog ‘Putting people first’ links to three interesting papers from CHI 2008 on mobile payments. From meiwaku to tokushita! Lessons for digital money design from Japan. Mainwaring, S., March, W., and Maurer, B. 2008. In Proceeding of the Twenty-Sixth Annual SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. “As an example of ubiquitous computing [...]