NFC (Near Field Communications) is a new technology in mobile world. It is supposed to be used for mobile payments like Google Wallet.
Most of the new Android and Windows phone have NFC support. I have a Samsung Galaxy S3 that has NFC as well as S-Beam so i thought why not use it. It is a small sticker with NFC built in. It can be programmed to perform various actions. I decided to get some in order to get first hand feel of how it works and if it is of any use in day to day life.
Samsung recently came out with tech tiles. More info can be found in the link below
http://www.samsung.com/us/microsite/tectile/
Samsung sells 3 NFC Tags for $15. I think its expensive. I looked around and found a very good site called
www.tagsfordroid.com. I ordered 5 tags for $11 and got NFC Keychain and stickers free. I received it a couple of days ago and started using it. Here is the review of what i think of the NFC Tags.
Configuring and using NFC Tags is very easy. It took me all of 1 min to set it up. Here is what i did.
I used NFC Task Launcher to configure what i wanna do with tags. The app gives you popular tags like Home, Car, Work. You can enable/disable settings in that. I chose to do a new one for my car.
I chose following options.
1. Wifi Toggle
2. Bluetooth Toggle
3. Ring Volume
4. Launch Maps
5. Enable GPS
6. Brightness to 25%
7. Launch MP3 Player
8. Send a message to my wife that i am on my way.
I made sure the tag is re-writable. You can lock it if you want making it read only but i prefer to re-write if i don't like the options. Once you click save and write, you have to close-in a tag at the back of the phone and it successfully saves it. All of this takes less than a minute if you know what you want to do with a tag.
I put the sticker in the car and started testing. First time it enables everything. If i am arriving at home, i put it to the tag and the settings are reversed. It works awesome even with a case. I also tested my friend's Nexus. It works fine and so does another S3. I then went ahead to configured other tags for work, home and gym. I am a happy camper. Money well spent.
The good thing about this tags is the capacity to write is huge (1000 bytes). Other tags are quite small in size thereby limiting what options you can put on it. Also this tags are good for 100,000 cycles.
So here are the pros and cons.
+ Easy to use and configure
+ Saves lots of clicks and time
+ Fast
+ Versatile
+ Very secure
+ No need of app after configuring.
+ Tasker command integrated into NFC opening up many options
- Market for NFC not mature enough
- You need to have the phone unlocked to use the tags.
- Lots of options to explore. Can replace QR Codes if used properly.
- Expensive initially but VFM over long time.
- Battery hog
- NFC Devices are few and far in market.
There are plenty of tutorials available online on how to set this up. If anyone requires a video tutorial, please let me know i would be glad to make a demo.
Thank you for reading.