Nokia’s Symbian^3 powered C7, which was announced on September 14th of this year and started shipping less than a month later on the 11th of October, has a little secret. Buried inside is a chip that is capable of interacting with other devices via near field communication (NFC), but due to schedules that failed to be kept the software to handle said chip wasn’t built on time. Not to worry, says Xavier des Horts, Head of Nokia Public Relations for France, who told French publication Teknologik that the C7 will get a firmware update early next year that will activate NFC functionality.
Implementing NFC has been something of a chicken and egg game for handset makers. They’ve been waiting for companies like Visa and MasterCard to update their payment terminals to support the technology, while said companies have also been waiting for phone manufactures to build devices that have NFC in the first place. Of course paying with your mobile phone isn’t the only use case that fear field technology brings about, but it’s one of the most compelling, especially with trials taking place all over the world. Including the United States.
Earlier this year Anssi Vanjoki, who announced that he’s leaving Nokia, told the world that a majority of Symbian^4 devices would be getting NFC built in. Problem is Nokia, after announcing that they’re committing to Qt and HTML 5 for application development, has said that they’re going to give up the current Symbian naming convention and that the operating system will just get incremental updates as new features get added. More recently Jo Harlow, Nokia’s Senior Vice President for Smartphones, said that all Nokia devices will soon be getting firmware upgrades on a much more frequent basis, and even get new features that initially didn’t ship with the first generation software.
Here’s hoping NFC takes off in 2011.
[Via: NFC World]