Near Field Communication technology, NFC for short, is something we’ve been drooling over for years here at IntoMobile Headquarters. Besides the obvious mobile payments scenario, the one where we pretend that we live in a future where we don’t have to carry a wallet, what we really want is to be able to move information from one device to another with as little friction as possible. Raise your hand if you’ve ever emailed yourself a grocery list or Google’d the address of a restaurant on your laptop and then typed said address into your mobile phone, letter by letter, switching between looking at your computer and your mobile device. We’ve all been there, and while there are solutions that get around the issue, they’re not really in use by too many people, are somewhat difficult to configure, and they offer limited functionality. Now imagine if your next laptop had NFC, as did your next smartphone, wouldn’t moving information between the two devices be easier than ever?
Here’s where Cirque Corporation comes in. Never heard of them? They invented the first laptop trackpad. Their latest innovation is figuring out how to embed an NFC antenna into a trackpad, as seen in the video above. This is important stuff since Windows 8 will include NFC functionality out of the box. At CES earlier this month Intel even showed off NFC working on their Ivy Bridge chips, which are due to hit the market as early as the first half of this year. Windows 8 isn’t slated to hit until Q3 2011 however, and we can’t imagine laptop vendors wanting to shoehorn NFC software on top of Windows 7 and worrying about supporting said solution.
The important point is this: NFC will finally make a meaningful splash in 2012, albeit late 2012, but it’s better than nothing. When Google launched the Nexus S in December 2010 we thought that 2011 would be the year of NFC … and it wasn’t.
Maybe things will be different for 2012?
[Via: NFC World]