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The new PayPal Beacon works with bluetooth LE... NFC seems like a step back from that.

• rodedwards 13y ago
  Hmm - I'm not familiar with Beacon, but will take a look. In my mind, NFC has always sort of felt like a clunky way of imposing a physical constraint on what should be a purely electronic transaction.
  • arrrg 13y ago
    NFC didn’t really break through in the market. Not yet, not ever, I don’t know. But I’m pretty sure that Apple is betting on Bluetooth LE, something their devices already have. I could see that work out.
    • alexcroox 13y ago
      Don't you wonder that the reason it didn't break the market was because iPhones never shipped with it. Same as QR codes, no default app to use them = poor adoption of the technology.
• blisterpeanuts 13y ago
  NFC is rather different from bluetooth and hence not really comparable for many use cases. Primarily, NFC is much lower power consumption than bluetooth, much smaller field, and much lower data/bandwidth. NFC is more in the category of RFID. Secondly, NFC tags are unpowered and rely on the reader for energy. They store several dozen bytes up to several thousand bytes and are useful for QR-style applications, like "Tap here for our address" and so forth. I did up some business cards with tappable tags on the back that take a device to my website. They also make tags fully embedded in paper and cardboard for cosmetic appeal. NFC tags are very cheap, on the order of a few cents each up to a dollar each, and are therefore well suited to the smart objects applications such as, for example, tapping a pill bottle to retrieve non-trivial amounts of information about the medicine, or storing identity information on personal possessions. Really, the applications are endless. I think Apple has missed the ball on this one. They should have included NFC early on. You can buy an iPhone case with NFC, which is useful but of course it's never as good as having it built in. (Interestingly, the linked article is on TechCrunch, a news website that recently published an article "NFC = No One Fking Cares!". Of course, the author, a journalist apparently with no engineering background, drew a lot of caustic comments for that one, and subsequently I stopped reading that publication. This iPhone 5 article is poorly edited; it's too bad this out of probably dozens of choices is the one that made it into YC.)
  • ricardobeat 13y ago
    Bluetooth Low Energy, which the parent commenter was referring to, uses a minuscule amount of power compared to the old standard. BLE devices can run for months on a coin cell, it has negligible impact on the battery life of a smartphone. Using NFC, the act of reading uses very little power, and of course tags are unpowered, but the reader needs to constantly scan for nearby tags, and that can be a battery hog. There are reports of 50% shorter battery life on NFC-equipped android phones.
    • blisterpeanuts 13y ago
      Yes, there's that Examiner article claiming 50% drainage. But look further and you'll learn that in Android, at least, NFC polling is off when screen is off or locked, and when screen is on and the NFC subsystem is active, it polls intermittently at a very low frequency of about 10 Hz to save power. Google I/O had a discussion of this (sorry I don't have the link) and they reported about a 0.5% power consumption hit when NFC was on. It definitely hits the battery but negligibly. I have NFC turned on all the time on my devices (GNex, N7, N4) and they run for 12 hours (about 30-50% usage rate).
• dzhiurgis 13y ago
  Exactly. I think it has a massive potential to take off together with Touch ID.