RIM’s job database has a position for an NFC specialist for their Rolling Meadows, Illinois, who would design and oversee the testing processes for as yet unannounced NFC devices. Man, Jim Balsillie wasn’t fooling around when he was talking about near-field communications on BlackBerry being more or less a sure thing.
For the uninitiated, near-field communications allow phones to talk with sensors just by tapping them. The most immediate use for this is contactless payments, like we see in credit cards and PayPass, but there’s a variety of uses that, once supported by the hardware, third-party app developers could explore. Even once smartphone manufacturers get on board with this, I still have a lot of hope for SideTap, which could enable NFC in a wide variety of existing handsets by bundling the tech into microSD cards.
RIM is right behind Samsung (and Android) in getting this feature out the door, and rumour has it Apple’s working on something with NFC too. We probably won’t have to wait too long into the new year to see the fruits of all of their labour, and with the support of banks and credit card companies, we may see wallets slowly become a thing of the past.
[via The Register]