If you’ve got a Nexus S and have been wanting to toy with its ability to read NFC tags, now you can! Read Write Web has some info about two apps that recently hit the Marketplace: Taglet and EnableTable.
These apps make use of the ability to read NFC tags that is found on the Nexus S model. Unfortunately, the Nexus S isn’t currently able to transmit information via NFC, but that limitation is soon to end. At that point, we should see an explosion of apps that are able to let phones communicate with other devices and objects in all sorts of innovative ways. But in the mean time, these two apps make excellent use of NFC, despite the limitation.
EnableTable is an approach to traditional customer rewards cards, but with an NFC twist. No more physical card, just scan the NFC tag present in the restaurant’s menu and enjoy the coupons that arrive on the phone! Their site states the following: “No scavenger hunts, elaborate rules, or games required. You don’t have to check-in and we do not try to follow you around.” Which I must smirk at because, while they may not have your precise GPS coordinates, they’ve still got a timestamp associated with a physical location! Small detail, right?
Taglet lets you read tags and assign a meaningful action to it. One example would be scanning the tag out of another NFC enabled handset to pick up its phone number—no more hassling with Bluetooth contact sharing. Or, say you want to catalog your Betamax and Laserdisc collections. Start slapping tags on them and Taglet would let you load up the IMDB page associated with the title. …I’m not the only one who collects ancient analog formats, am I?
This video shows Taglet in action, and has some sweet tunes to keep your body movin’!
Also of note, Google has announced that it is looking to hire someone with NFC experience. Combine that with the fact that Google will soon be enabling Nexus S handsets’ ability to transmit as well as receive information via NFC and you get a lot of speculation about how long it will be before mobile payment services begin to show up en masse. It probably won’t take long!
How would you use NFC to make life better?
Sources: ReadWriteWeb, Android Central, Taglet, EnableTable
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Ok, I can see Taglet being pretty cool. Using an NFC card, it is a 3rd-party registration of the information associated with that card. What that means is that you can assign whatever you want to it. I don’t think I’d put my PIN attached to my NFC enabled ATM card, but for my bus pass, I might leave a note to return it to the owner, and leave my contact info. If I loose my pass and someone else comes along, on the 1,000,000 : 1 chance they decide to run it through Taglet, I might recover it. I can see it being used more by business though to track different assets.
Taglet is just reading the tag out of whatever object you want to scan. It ends up kinda just being a static ID. The app itself is what provides the association.
At this time, the Nexus S is read only and can’t transmit back to a tag/other NFC device. And I’m honestly not certain if it’ll be able to reprogram the data in tags themselves, but I’d imagine so. At least, if the tag supports it. Then the type of interaction you’re describing would be possible.
I’ll look into it and see if I can dig up more about the capabilities that will be enabled down the line. Maybe even find something else to write about!
It is a static ID, but for the purpose I described that works. I look forward to enhanced NFC capabilities in the future.
Apparently I was too busy grooving to the music. I completely missed the fact that it is “cloud connected”, as it were! I was thinking the associations were stored on your own device. That definitely makes it far more useful! I could see that type of setup being worked into geocaching for travel bugs…