NFC is enabled on your Nokia, now what? Start by downloading Xchange NFC app!

NFC is enabled on your Nokia, now what? Start by downloading Xchange NFC app from the Ovi store!

Nokia has been at the forefront of NFC for some time. Just yesterday Nokia announced three new NFC smartphones to join its Nokia C7 / Astound and the sought after Nokia N9. The new Nokia 700, Nokia 701 & Nokia 600 are launching imminently and users are asking, “What can I do with NFC?” The answer is a lot. Nokia itself has released its Nokia Essence earbuds that pair with Bluetooth using NFC, the Play 360 NFC speakers and a couple of media receivers that allow you to connect the tunes on your phone with a home cinema system. Games are available with NFC features and more are in development, and data and file exchanges just got a little taste of frictionless NFC goodness too.

Nokia has even gone as far as launching its NFC Hub website that helps use NFC for marketing and connecting with consumers. As of yet the company has barely scratched the surface of NFC’s capabilities. However, near field communications has a more practical side to its abilities that helps to cut down the paper-trail and allows users to exchange information in the blink of an eye – and Finnish-based developer, Aditux, has an app for that.

Xchange NFC app for Symbian based NFC phones now available in the Ovi app store for free

When it comes to NFC and smartphones, they fit like a hand in a glove. NFC enables smartphones to take some of the time out of mundane day-to day actions and also adds new core capabilities. However, like most smartphone technologies, NFC is only as strong as the software that is written to support it. NFC doesn’t buck that trend, but luckily there is enough developers excited about near field communications who are producing apps.

Over the next 18 months, Nokia is projected to ship more than 100 million NFC-enabled smartphones globally, so there are a lot of users who will be experimenting with near field communications. As a base for this technological revolution, Nokia has partnered with Poken. They have built its NFC core around the PokenMOBILE NFC app, which is available on the Ovi store. But one software solution doesn’t give you all the capabilities you need. That’s where the Xchange Symbian NFC app from Aditux comes in. To put it simply, Xchange takes up the gauntlet of contact sharing over networks in a frictionless NFC manner.

Xchange allows users to exchange business cards, photos and other information by touching their NFC phones together. Contact details are exchanged via email as well added to the contacts section of both devices in a VCard format. The Xchange NFC app even allows photographs to be appended to contacts. Currently  the exchange takes place over the network. In the future, the app developer says that it will update the software for offline use. Once the user goes online, the contact details will be shared automatically.

After the exchange is done, the Xchange NFC app ensures both users automatically receive each other’s contact details in their mailbox in a VCF format, which also allows for meetings to be scheduled and shared in the same manner. As a result, users can also save the contact details in Outlook or many other mail applications for future use on their PC or Mac as well as on their NFC phone. The app is available for free over at the Ovi App store and you can get to it by clicking here. If you give the Xchange NFC app a go, let us know what you think to it in the comments.