Is Near Field Communications Coming To The iPhone?

on 08/16/2010, filed in Home > Apple

Could Apple be looking to bring Near Field Communications (NFC) to its future iPhones? The fruity company has quietly hired Benjamin Vigier, a expert in said field and a person who has worked on mobile payment apps for PayPal, Sprint, Starbucks and other high-profile companies. It wasn’t immediately clear what his task is at Apple, but his position is Apple’s new Product Manager of Mobile Commerce. Let’s not forget that Apple has some pretty useful patents such as purchasing concert tickets via iTunes which could be useful when combined with NFC technology, or using the iPhone to pay for your purchases in the future. Looks like we’ll have to be patient and see what happens in the future, though the idea of a NFC-enabled iPhone does have us smiling.

Apple Inc: Apple Inc was founded in 1976 by Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak and Ronald Wayne as a computer company wich is often credited to have initiated personal computing. After a meteoric rise in the 80s, Apple had lost the personal computing battle against Microsoft and others in the 90s. But in the late 90s and early 2000s, the company came back to profitability by focusing on less products and started using industry-standard components. Apple's largest business is now in the smartphone space, with the iPhone representing more than half of the revenues and an even larger part of the profits. Read our Apple product reviews to see what the company has been up to: iPhone 5 Review, Macbook Pro with Retina display review

iPhone: iPhone: The iPhone is Apple's line of smartphones. That was also the original name of the first iPhone, which was announced on January 9th 2007 by Steve Jobs during the Macworld Keynote. The iPhone was released to the public in June of the same year. The development of the iPhone started in 2004, was internally called "project purple" and was the fruit of a collaboration between Apple and AT&T. Since then, Apple has released new iPhone models every year, with the iPhone 3G in July 2008, the iPhone 3GS in June 2009, the iPhone 4 in June 2010, the iPhone 4S in October 2011 and the iPhone 5 in September 2012. The iPhone represented more than half of Apple's revenues in 2012.

NFC: stands for Near Field Communication, which is a standard for low-speed wireless short range communications between electronic devices. Popular applications of NFC are public transportation passes and some form of electronic wallet, but many more applications remains to be tested and implemented. NFC is a cousin of RFID and uses some of the same communications protocols.

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