Gadgetory

hey guys it's Joe the Android guy you ever wondered why it's so difficult to transfer a file or really any information from one phone to another using NFC well I've got the answer to that question along with some history of another transport mechanism you may or may not remember let's go take a look let's spend a few minutes talking about the history of transfer stuff shall we back in the days before Bluetooth and Bluetooth really isn't well a halfway decent transport mechanism but way back when we had something called irda that was infrared something something basically it was like a remote control see that little guy right there you had a little sensor and a little transmitter that shot infrared light and while you could control your TV with it which was fun not really but you know hey we we could and and that was cool and made us speaks but you could also transfer stuff from one device to another device by beaming it beaming that's what they called it just line up your device with that other device hit the beam and you know after five minutes your JPEG that was really low quality already was transferred over to the other device woohoo ok so for transfers of pictures and music files it was painful literally painful halfway through most of the time the transport would fail you'd have to start all over again after three or four times you just give up but that's okay because only like eight of us have any mp3s on our devices back then anyway so no biggie and you know there were no cameras on the devices back then anyway so no biggie we could always email them to each other and then wait until we got back home so we could dock our phones and send them through our desktop email clients because that's what we did back then yes kids back when I wow did I just do that I'm old but infrared was kind of a standard it was really good for transporting say business cards I love doing that I could beam you my business cards by pointing my phone at you and hitting beam and it was relatively small so it took 10-15 seconds but I could transport all of my contact information into your device immediately and it was so cool as long as you were using a device running the same operating system that I was since I was running windows ce e that meant almost nobody because everyone else was running palm there were some apps that helped bridge the gap but most of the time the other person also had to have the poem equivalent of that app luckily there was one I don't even remember the name if you do put that down in the comments that well it let you translate everything with apologies to Gene Roddenberry it was the universal translator I could send it to a Newton I could send it to a palm device all from my windows siiii PDA because the app was smart enough to say aha I know what format to send that in wasn't quite smart enough to figure out what kind of device it was sending it to and do it all automatically for you but hey at least you could do it right and I could and I did at least four times I did that in real life in retrospect that was probably an awful lot of effort wasted but but passwords today today we have NFC and it lives right back here in the back of our phones in the back of our tablets and it's making the world a better place for everyone all over the ok it's not and why isn't it well NFC is near field communication so there's arts first limitation it's near you've got to literally have something like that close if not touching to be able to get it to work you've seen my neat little videos where we showed off cool things you could do with NFC and for everybody who sent in their little tips and tricks of what they're doing with NFC thank you so much those are so cool but it's all device to something if I don't want to buy tags what can I do well I did buy a whole bunch of tags and honestly after I did those video is you know how many tags I've burnt none sorry it's just not that cool once you get past it as soon as it becomes more ubiquitous and less of a I'm a geek and I can do this because I can it'll be great but we're NFC really can shine is here's one device and there's another device around here somewhere here's one device they both have em in the NFC in them and I can tap them together and do stuff well what can I do this is an Android device this is an Android device they both have that have NSC and they're both running a the same version of the operating system you know jelly bean so it's great everything works fine I can take a YouTube clip and say here send it over there but i'm not sending the youtube clip what I'm doing is I'm opening the opening the YouTube app and I'm sending that link or that reference over to this other device this other device says oh okay I know what you're talking about and it opens and plays it great if I want to send a a business card and I have a special app that I've built that in I can do that I can i can send that over but unlimited very very limited on how much data i can send in fact like we just talked about I'm not sending the data from my phone in my youtube data to my tablet what I'm doing is I'm sending a reference okay so what does that have to do with anything let's say I want to send a picture all I can do the same thing this too this pink great works except it's not going over NFC it's going over Bluetooth or it could be going over Wi-Fi direct or it could be going over some other transport medium all the NFC is doing is it's starting the process it's saying hey this guy wants to transfer something to you and it's this type of thing and here's how I want to do it this says okay I know how to do that go ahead tada it works and it's magic and it's wonderful as long as you're the same less what if you've something that's not the same OS even let's go back from jelly bean to ice cream sandwich does it work not all of it because there's new stuff that was introduced in jelly bean that makes NFC transfers better faster quicker more helpful so if you're going back to ice cream sandwich you're not going to be able to do that or not going to be able to do it as easily as you would with jelly bean but that's still android to android what about android to newton little geek humor there because newton doesn't exist anymore homeland silence for newton but anyway nokia still exists for a while anyway so what if i want to send something from my android running jelly bean to my nokia running Windows Phone can I do that nope not good and work why because they don't understand each other it's NFC they should and this is saying hey I've got this stuff I want to send to you and this says I hear your words but I have no idea what you're saying dude no idea at all and it doesn't let that work because the transport layer isn't initialized it's not started and it's not going to work until we get everybody to work together now what's gonna happen what's it going to take to make this happen unfortunately the big player out there Apple they don't have NFC yet maybe soon hopefully well then everything's going to break because they're going to do it their own way and that means it's different than every other way out there but that does mean that they are going to push because there's like 18 gazillion Apple devices out there none of which have NFC but the ones that will everybody's going to try and be interoperable with those and that's kind of I predict going to push an interoperability standard it's not really a standard it's more of just an ad-hoc little let's get everything to work if we can and we probably will and it'll be great it's not the way we should go about doing things but it's the way we're probably going to have to once we do that however transferring files no transferring cool stuff back and forth it's going to be a lot easier and isn't technology all about making things easier so let me know what stories you have about using NFC in good ways or in bad ways success stories or failures let us know down in the comments we all want to know what did you do to overcome those did you revert back to the old i'll just email you an attachment or did you do something more creative let us know down in the comments NFC still has a future and not just as a credit card but as something that can really open it up we'll see more of that with the the Nexus Q when it comes out and the NFC stuff that you can do with it that'll be fun for pocket now musing about NFC interoperability and infrared of old I'm Joe Levi