Every year for the past five years Apple has introduced their interpretation of what a smartphone should be. The newest model, the iPhone 4S, was unveiled in early October 2011. We’re all expecting to see the iPhone 5 in the September/October time frame, which is right around the corner. What will Apple do to make their next Jesus Phone special? Rumors that are flying around the internets suggest that the iPhone 5 will have a 4 inch display that has a resolution of 1136 x 640 pixels. It’s also expected that the new iPhone will finally ditch the 30 pin dock connector that Apple introduced way back in 2003 with the third generation iPod. Now, according to a new report from 9to5Mac, we’re learning that the new iPhone will also have support for near field communication (NFC) technology. Considering that all of today’s high end Android smartphones come with this feature, it shouldn’t be too much of a surprise to hear that the 2012 iPhone will get NFC too.
The more important question is what’s Apple going to do with NFC? Samsung and Sony are trying to peddle NFC enabled stickers that let you tap to perform certain actions. Will Apple do the same? Nokia’s NFC enabled variant of the Lumia 610 will enable people to pay for things where normally they’d use cash or plastic. Will the next iPhone let you do that? There’s a lot of potential here, but we’re probably not going to hear about any of it until Apple gets on a stage and runs through all their bullet points explaining how they’re going to change the world, cure AIDS, and free America from their dependence on foreign oil.
What we want to know is how well will an NFC enabled iPhone talk to an NFC enabled Android phone and an NFC enabled Windows Phone? We wouldn’t be shocked to find out that NFC doesn’t work across different platforms, but at the same time we do hope that companies get together and at least try to play nice.