A brand new technology is on the way for mobile phones – the near field communication (NFC for short) chip. This has been a feature of phones in Asia for a couple of years now, with a short-ranged 13.56 MHz signal, useful over a range usually about 4 cm but can be up to 20 cm, it can be used to swipe the phone to make payments. For instance, it would allow your phone to be used as a credit card or to buy bus or train tickets at a turn stile. This is how it has been used in Asia and it is being publicised as the biggest technology to hit the US & European mobile phones for years; however until now this has not happened.

With many stores unwilling to spend the money on expensive equipment that would only be used by small numbers of their customers, the set-up needed to use the chip in Europe and the US is not in place just yet. A number of companies have now decided to push the issue so adoption will begin to become more widespread.

One of the best features of NFC is the way it uses an initiator and a target, the initiator could be the ticket machine or paying point in a shop whilst the target can be an unpowered chip, allowing it to be included in items such as cards, keychains and so on, enabling it to draw it’s power from the initiator.

This technology is still absent from a lot of the latest phones, so it is unlikely you will be seeing it in phones such as the Nokia E6, but it will be incorporated in some top of the line phones. Samsung and Google’s Nexus S, was an interesting example as the original Galaxy S, which the Nexus S is very closely related to, lacked this capability suggesting it was Google who thought it could be a key element to add.

This may also be related to the otherwise strange omission of a microSD slot from the Nexus S, something Android users are accustomed to, to increase their phone’s internal storage and something the Galaxy S did have.

Some of the technologies being demonstrated at the recent MWC, Mobile World Congress, were based on the niche created by phones like the Samsung Galaxy Ace and the HTC Wildfire S lacking NFC technology.

The first of these is from Visa, who, similar to Google, chose to take steps to push the adoption of NFC technology. It utilises a card that fits into the microSD slot of the HTC Wildfire S & communicates with apps on your phone to give complete NFC functionality. While this denies you the use of the slot temporarily, the ease with which microSD cards can be swapped, even in phones which do not allow ‘hotswapping’, should not make this much of a problem.

The impact of this technology should be substantial as it is predicted that almost all retailers will be very quick to implement this feature. In addition, services such as public transport will have to build card readers which should make buying tickets far more efficient for consumers.

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