NFC tablet brought to market in the form of the Sharp RW-T107

NFC tablet brought to market in the form of the Sharp RW-T107 Gingerbread-toting tablet

Sharp Japan has just announced its first NFC tablet, the Sharp RW-T107. It runs on Android Gingerbread  and has an NFC chip built in. Sharp, a company who has long been associated with TVs and home entertainment systems, has recently been gearing up its product lines with phones and tablets galore. The new Sharp RW-T107 is likely to be a Japan-only slate at this point, as the company intends to manufacture 5000 units per month. However, now both TazTag and Sharp have NFC tablets in the wild which adds some more fuel to the fire to encourage other OEMs to get on board with their own NFC tablet devices. The Sharp RW-T107 has a 7-inch capacitive touch panel with a resolution of 1024 x 600 pixels, which makes it a great size for consumers to carry about and for merchants to use as POS interfaces and we expect to see a lot of retailers take on NFC tablet devices in the next 12 months. Samsung is also reputed to be launching the Galaxy Tab, which is a 7-incher that will be announced on September 1st in Berlin. We will have to wait to see whether it, too, is an NFC tablet.

Sharp RW-T107 7 inch NFC tablet specification

There hasn’t been a lot of details shared about the specifications of this tablet as yet. However, we spoke with a couple of our sources and managed to scrounge some preliminary specs for the Sharp RW-T107 NFC tablet.  As we mentioned before, the Sharp RW-T107 NFC tablet is rocking Gingerbread and not Honeycomb as you may have expected. For its brain, Sharp has chosen TI OMAP 4430, 1 GHz Processor and has chosen to back that up with 512MB of RAM and *GB of internal memory. The memory can of course be bumped by using the microSD slot which we guess will top out at 32GB. As far as cameras are concerned, the Sharp RW-T107 boasts a 3 megapixel shooter round back and fronts a respectable 2 megapixel camera frontside. Connectivity comes as you may expect in the Wireless a/b/g/n flavors at 5Ghz and Bluetooth is of the 2.1 + EDR variety. There are also a microUSB, micro HDMI and 3.5 mm audio jacks to connect your stuff.

On the sensor side of things, the Sharp RW-T107 NFC tablet has the usual suspects inclusive of an accelerometer, gyro, electronic compass, light sensor and GPS chip. We have no data on how long a full charge will last consumers as yet but we do know that the NFC tablet has a 5400 mA / h battery on board. The speakers on most tablets are nothing to write home about, and that tradition continues with the Sharp RW-T107 NFC tablet that pumps out sounds with the use of the 2×1, 5 W assembly. Our advice with any tablet is to get a pair of bluetooth headphones. If the Sharp NFC tablet was available here, our advice would be get a pair of NFC-enabled headphones that connect to Bluetooth. Dimensions are 194 x 130 x 11.5 so the Sharp RW-T107 could be pretty svelte. The NFC tablet weights only 395 grams, so should be easy to tote around. However, the specification that we are interested in is the ISO 14443 Type A and FeliCa capabilities of the Sharp RW-T107 NFC tablet. NFC tablets are thin on the ground at the moment and we only know of two. The 7-inch form factor allows NFC to become a valuable resource for NFC mobile payments and also ushers in an age where retail associates can take payments and check stock levels straight from the shop floor. Sharp also feels that the NFC tablet will find a home in marketing and be used for loyalty programs and the company has even built in authentication protocols that use FeliCa to prevent unauthorized use. Although some feel that having an NFC tablet is not as useful as an NFC phone we actually believe they too have their place ,and uses and we look forward to seeing more hit the market. We would have loved to have seen the Sharp RW-T107 ship with Android HoneyComb and as yet, we have no idea whether the NFC tablet will get an Ice Cream Sandwich upgrade. All we can say is today we are jealous of Japanese consumers who can get their hands on a Sharp RW-T107 NFC tablet which starts shipping September 5th, but pricing is unknown at this time.

UPDATE:

Our sources have confirmed pricing as 60,000 Yen (JPY) or around $785.03 and we have also learned that the NFC tablet is aimed squarely at enterprise users and will not be available to consumers. Below we have the official specifications.

※ five  hours actual driving time and the charge depends on the environment.

※ six  power OFF while the ambient temperature at 25 degrees and the time was measured by connecting the included AC adapter.

END SHARP RW-T107 NFC TABLET UPDATE