10.21
mobileinfo
iPhone 4 buyers on the iPhone launch day 4.(Credit: Josh Lowensohn/CNET)
What a confusing week for iPhone rumors. On Monday, said a report by the independent that Apple was holding off on near-field communication (NFC) technology to the next version of the iPhone, and then a story posted last night by Forbes claims that the effort is still on track.
The source on that newer report states that "an entrepreneur who at a top-secret NFC product works," which has a buddy to work at Apple. That compared with the independent from multiple sources on the issue, which had "several of the largest mobile operators in the United Kingdom."
Who to trust may be less important than the underlying message: NFC is coming to a future iPhone, it's just a matter of when.
This is the latest in a series of reports that the iPhone and other Apple products as recipients of NFC technology have linked to. NFC can transfer data between two devices on short distances (about 4 inches). For phones can this stuff like mobile payments, as well as transferring data between devices without the use of a mobile or near Wi-Fi network in a similar way to Bluetooth.
Signs that Apple was interested in NFC first surfaced in April last year, with the company submitting a number of patents, including use cases for the technology in its products. One of those which entails simply using an embedded NFC chip pick up on a nearby item for purchase. Other, more advanced use cases included things like a smart shopping cart system that what you had in your bag could tell, and let you pay for them on the spot with a NFC device.
One of the first major hints that NFC came to the next iPhone specifically comes from the blog TechCrunch some four months after the barrage of patent applications. That report, which cited an anonymous source, said that Apple planned to build NFC-enabled iPhones that hardware from NXP Semiconductor used. This was reinforced by the fact that a few days ago, the company had hired Benjamin Vigier, who had a background with NFC technology, the product manager for mobile commerce. Vigier had been a product manager at MFoundry, a company that payment technology for some 300 banks and credit unions, as well as the mobile service of PayPal processed.
Shortly after the report by TechCrunch, cult of Mac blog claimed that Apple's plans for NFC payments could far beyond racks and portable computing features include:
If users an iPhone NFC-equipped Golf on a Mac of the NFC (they must be close to interaction), the Mac all their applications, settings, and load data. It will be as if they were on their own machine at home or work. When the user leaves, and the iPhone NFC-equipped is out of reach, the host machine returns to its previous state.
That system of Apple computers to start packaging NFC chips should, which is not yet the case.
A follow-up to that report appeared last night, with cult of Mac Apple already say that "different" iPhone prototypes with built-in NFC was testing, but that there are still quite a bit of work to be done on the system that users log on and applications on NFC-enabled Mac computers with their NFC-enabled phones. That system, of the blog source said, took advantage of the Mac App Store to download applications that they could have bought on another computer, and they are usable for those computing session, even if it was not their own machine.
In addition to the cult of Mac report came one of the other news bits that claimed that NFC was led to the next version of the iPhone from Bloomberg in January. Citing sources at Apple, said technology consultant Richard Doherty, who was interviewed in the report, which the company indeed planning a service payments that makes use of NFC was and that was led to the AT&T version of the iPhone, as well as the iPad 2. On the basis of a follow-up interview with the NFC Times, Doherty claimed Bloomberg had misquoted him, and that his sourcing was not Apple, but developers for equipment manufacturers from China that Apple had delivered in the past.
As mentioned in our NFC story Monday, Apple has now more than 200 million Apple ID accounts, something the company claims is the largest number of accounts associated with credit cards on the Web. That payment network outside the domain of digital goods presents not only a new business opportunity for Apple, but also a way to combat competitor Google, which the company to the hardware, punch, including NFC support in the latest version of its Android mobile operating system already has beaten, and in new phones like the Nexus s. There is also Hewlett-Packard and its TouchStone connectivity technology, which is headed to the TouchPad tablet and phones with WebOS coming this spring.
Apple is expected to announce the follow-up to the iPhone 4 in June. That device is already said to be nearing its final form.
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