In a little under a month the entire IntoMobile team will converge from the four corners of the Earth in the city of Barcelona where it will be our mission to bring you, our lovely readers, exhaustive coverage of Mobile World Congress, as well as to drink the city dry of their fantastic red wine, and let’s not forget evade the police because an unnamed editor will no doubt improperly touch a booth babe. No, but seriously, one of the biggest expectations we have of the event are announcements from all the major handset vendors involving near field communication (NFC) technology in one form or another. Word on the street is that South Korean firm LG is looking at launching a sub $200 Android smartphone that has NFC built in. Considering that the only handset to ship with both Android and NFC support is the insanely expensive Samsung manufactured Google Nexus S, this rumor has the potential to disturb the status quo.
Technologies don’t take off when they’re limited to a certain segment of the market. If this device, supposedly called the LG Pecan, is the real deal then it opens up the possibility of operators subsidizing it and offering it for free to their customers thereby getting NFC the much needed traction it needs to become popular. The ideas of a mobile wallet replacement, public transportation card replacement, door key replacement are attractive enough that people will snag up NFC in droves, but not unless the price is right.
The source of this rumor, Korean website etnews, says that the Pecan will have a slower processor, and lower quality display, compared to other Android devices, which makes sense since they’re trying to keep costs down, but they also say it’ll run Android 2.2 instead of version 2.3 which actually comes with NFC support baked in. That’s got to be a typo.
We’ll just have to wait and see.