Will Coleman, Developer Evangelist and Product Manager at Microsoft UK, started a whole bunch of unnecessary hubub late last week when he told TechRadar that Windows Phone 7.5 Mango has NFC support, but OEMs had decided for some strage reason to forgo building smartphones that have NFC chips inside. Microsoft issued a response yesterday to WinRumors saying that: “While NFC is not currently supported on Windows Phone 7.5, it is coming. We expect NFC-enabled Windows Phone devices to ship within the next year.” So basically Microsoft confirmed that A) Coleman has no idea what he was talking about, and B) Within the next 12 months we should Windows Phones out on the market that can do things like share contact information with a single tap or pay for our morning newspaper and coffee. Now as to whether we’ll see NFC come in Tango, due to come out in the early half of 2012, or Apollo, which will launch towards the end of the 2012, that’s yet to be discovered. That being said, CES and Mobile World Congress are both happening within the span of the next 2 months, so it isn’t going to be long until we find out what’s what.
The bigger question on our minds is will all these NFC enabled devices due to hit the market in 2012 interact with each other? Earlier today Eldar Murtazin, Editor in Chief of Mobile-Review, posted two tweets that reveal a deeply disturbing truth about the current state of NFC:
Quick question. Why i couldn’t use NFC between Nokia n9/google galaxy nexus to send contacts? both phones vibrates but nothing happens
— Eldar Murtazin (@eldarmurtazin) December 13, 2011
Find out that NFC is not compatible between different vendors (like Bluetooth). So, you couldn’t use Nokia NFC to interacting with Android
— Eldar Murtazin (@eldarmurtazin) December 13, 2011
If this doesn’t change then it’s going to be up a serious boondoggle for application developers to make cross platforms apps that actually talk to each other.