Nokia’s Research Center, filled with some of the best minds in the mobile industry working on things like materials science, battery research, and radio technology, have released a video demoing what they’re calling “Explore and Share”. Sadly, they don’t provide any background information whatsoever about the tech that powers their demo, but we think we know what they’re doing. Say you want to share a file with your friend and both of you have devices that are near field (NFC) enabled. Traditional NFC has the ability to transmit data, but only small amounts, with the largest tags on the market storing only 512 bytes. To combat this the NFC can tell other parts of your mobile phone, such as the Bluetooth or WiFi chips, to turn on and initiate a file transfer. Doing so would enable you and your friend to share said file at not only a much faster speed, but also enable you to share files that are monstrous in size. With all the 1080p smartphones coming out this year, that video of your cat chasing a laser pointer isn’t going to be tiny.
Now the second part of Nokia’s “Explore and Share” video is what baffles us. They’ve got something called “Express Tags”, which are like NFC tags, but they transmit data at up to 100 Mbps and said tags store up to 1 gigabit of data. That sounds like a lot, but it’s actually just 128 MB. Enough to send a few songs, a large photo album, or something similar. For the “Express Tag” concept to work, that sticker would have to have some sort of radio inside that’s most likely Bluetooth or WiFi, and it should also have a storage chip. That would make an “Express Tag” both difficult to manufacturer and costly. That being said, transmitting 1 gigabit in 10 seconds is a lot faster than downloading the same amount of data over 3G.
Anyway, we’ll see where NFC goes once more and more devices come with the technology by default.