A lot of people are wondering what’s the use of NFC or near field communication on mobile phones such as the new BlackBerries. NFC allows devices to pair with each other by just tapping the two together. Similar to the Bump or Toinks app for Android for sharing contacts by bumping two phones together, but this requires an internet connection. NFC simply needs the two devices to be near each other to pair.
Research In Motion introduces BlackBerry Tag to make use of the NFC capability of the new BlackBerry smartphones. With BB Tag, just tap your NFC-powered BlackBerry to another one to share contact information, documents, URLs, photos and other multimedia content. It will also enable friends to instantly add one another as contacts on BBM.
The BlackBerry Tag will be available on the next BB OS 7 update. RIM also announced plans to expose BlackBerry Tag through APIs on the BlackBerry platform, allowing software developers to take advantage of “tap to share” functionality from within their own applications.
Not really an exciting use of NFC but it’s a start.