HTC Desire could get NFC compatibility with upcoming Gingerbread update

Over the last couple of months there has been flip-flop news about whether or not the HTC Desire would get Google’s Gingerbread OS which includes NFC compatibility. Yesterday the company confirmed on its Facebook page that it would indeed be upgrading its HTC Desire to run on Google Android 2.3 Gingerbread.

This is the quote from the company “Hi all- We’re excited to share that we are testing our build of Gingerbread for HTC Desire and will start doing quality assurance for it this week. When we have an update on availability we’ll post another announcement. Thanks for your support!”

HTC is testing Gingerbread on its Desire smartphone at the moment and should be releasing the update over the air within the next few weeks.

HTC Desire Gingerbread rollout date not announced

First released in April of last year the HTC Desire is starting to age, and it was feared that the device would not have enough memory to run on Android 2.3. The company had said it would not be updating the HTC Desire on the 15th of June but changed its mind within an hour and we have been waiting for an update ever since. The smartphone features a 3.7 inch display and zips along with a 1GHz processor and has 512 MB of RAM. The HTC desire ships with Android 2.1, or Eclair, and has a 5 mega pixel shooter with flash and geotagging capability.

Will the HTC Desire get true NFC compatibility?

Android Gingerbread comes with a few advancements over Eclair that will extend the battery life of the HTC Desire, add video calling and potentially ship with the software support for NFC compatibility. Where as the HTC Desire has no internal NFC chip or secure element, there are a few solutions on the market that could allow the phone to be upgraded so it could potentially handle NFC. Android Gingerbread comes with tag reading and writing software and native support for NFC. We know that Softbank Mobile used the HTC Desire as an NFC device using a NFC SIM card in a field trial at the backend of last year. What we are yet to find out, however, is will NFC MicroSD cards or an NFC-enabled SIM give the HTC Desire NFC compatibility based on the fact that Google Android speaks the language of near field communications? If the HTC Desire can have NFC compatibility, all we have to say is “Stella!”