Today’s Windows Phones don’t have near field communication (NFC) support. Not because there isn’t any NFC hardware out there, but because Microsoft hasn’t built the protocol into the platform. Later this year, with the release of Windows Phone 8, that’ll obviously change, but how will Microsoft market the feature? According to NFC World, Microsoft just filed a trademark for the log below. They haven’t announced a name for it yet, but according to Microsoft’s official “Windows 8 Near Field Proximity Implementation Specification” that was published late last month, it’s going to be called “Tap and Do”. Not exactly riveting stuff, but hey, who cares what it’s called as long as it enables some really cool features, right?
The big question here is what’s Microsoft’s going to try and do with NFC, because when you think about, they’ll also be putting NFC support into the desktop version of Windows, the one that’s going to run on tablets. Pretty soon it’s going to be impossible to buy a device without NFC, and we’re really looking forward to seeing what happens when that’ll be the case. Right now there are a few NFC enabled smartphones out, many of them surprisingly run Symbian, and they’re pretty much useless for all intents and purposes. Transferring contacts is still a pain in the ass, forget about transferring content across different platforms, and as for financial payments … Google really screwed up their launch of Google Wallet. It runs on what, two phones, on one or two operators, in one country?
We can’t talk about NFC adoption without discussing the elephant in the room, Apple. Until they put NFC inside the iPhone or in the iPad, the rest of the industry isn’t really going to care. Samsung, HTC, Nokia, they’ll show off NFC demos at trade shows to lure some press people into their booth, but let’s be honest, when it comes to driving adoption of a new technology, it’ll have from a product that was designed in California.
[Photo Above: Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer about to tap and do someone against their will]