Companies file trademarks for products or gimmicky marketing terms all the time. Whether or not they actually use said trademark is for them to decide. HTC recently filed one such trademark for “CLOSECONNECT”, which according to the description below is nothing more than a fancy way of saying NFC or Near Field Communications. Considering HTC has yet to ship a single smartphone that supports NFC, we’re eager to see the first “CLOSECONNECT” products, but then again we’ve been saying that NFC is “just around the corner” for what feels like at least half a decade. Anyway, here’s the full blown legal jargon for curious minds:
Computer hardware and software for setting up, configuring, and administering wireless networks; Computer application software for mobile phones, cellular phones, smartphones, PDAs, and tablet computers used to connect to other mobile devices; Computer software for mobile phones, cellular phones, smartphones, PDAs, and tablet computers used for the collection, editing, organizing, modifying, book marking, transmission, storage and sharing of data and information; Computer application software for mobile phones, cellular phones, smartphones, PDAs, and tablet computers used to manage near field communication technology features on those devices; Computer software for setting up, configuring, and administering peer-to-peer networks and local peer-to-peer networks.
We sincerely hope that HTC doesn’t pull a stunt whereby they refuse to say that their products are NFC enabled and start correcting journalists and bloggers with this new fangled “CLOSECONNECT” term. Worse yet, if there’s an associated logo … that’s not going to make things any easier for consumers. We’ll give HTC the benefit of the doubt right now. All we know is this: The last 5 months of this year are starting to look very exciting. Between new versions of Android, Google Wallet, and now a slew of NFC devices from damn near everyone, it looks like this holiday shopping season is going to make geeks around the world cream their shorts.