Michael Hurlston (pictured above), Senior Vice Oresident of Home and Wireless Networking at Broadcom, told journalists at a press briefing held last week in San Francisco that by this time next year 10% to 15% of all mobile phones on the market will feature support for near field communications, better known as NFC. His prediction, along with the claim by NXP CEO Rick Clemmer that by the end of this year 100 million phones will ship with NFC support, have us actually believing that we’re finally reaching a point where NFC is no longer a technology we see demoed at trade shows year after year, but instead something that will genuinely start affecting our day to day lives. Among the many awesome things you can do with NFC, wireless payments is the use case that attracts the most attention. Google recently launched “Google Wallet”, and although it only works on the Nexus S 4G on Sprint, it paves the way for things to come. In 2012 we’re looking forward to Isis, the joint venture setup by AT&T, T-Mobile, and Verizon to offer a solution for mobile payments, hitting the scene and hopefully becoming mainstream.
Just like GPS used to be something that only high end smartphones came with, NFC is currently limited to devices like the Nexus S and Samsung Galaxy S II, which by the way doesn’t even ship today with NFC in many parts of the world as they’re facing a component shortage. We’re going to have to wait until you can get something that’s near field enabled for less than $200 for things to really start picking up. Orange, over in the UK, recently launched Quick Tap, which is similar to Google Wallet, but instead uses the Samsung Tocoo Lite, a low end feature phone.
Look forward to nearly everything announced at Mobile World Congress 2012 to have an NFC chip inside.