Nokia commits to NFC in all mobile phones from now on

Nokia commits to NFC in all mobile phones from now on including upcoming WP7 phones

Nokia has installed NFC chips in all of the phones the Finnish handset maker has launched this year – the Nokia C7 / Astound and the Nokia N9. Nokia just this last week also announced the Nokia 600, Nokia 700 and the Nokia 701 which all feature NFC (near field communications). So far, in the new NFC phone market Nokia, and to a lesser extent BlackBerry, have been the biggest manufacturers to embrace near field communications technology in their phones. However, Nokia has been playing with NFC for years and have been involved in multiple use case projects. The company has recently also launched its NFC-Hub website that concentrates on the marketing uses for NFC. This supported the Museum of London in enabling visitors to learn more and hear the sounds of London using NFC phones and NFC tags to provide immersive experiences. Nokia at this point is famed for now including NFC payments secure elements as they want to concentrate on NFC’s other capabilities that include content sharing, content marketing and social NFC.

Nokia giving a lot of NFC attention to Asia

We reported a couple of weeks ago about the partnership between UPM RFID and the social and location aware, Jiepang Chinese network. This last week Nokia weighed into the partnership helping back up the NFC tag company and social network with the phones required to help get the capabilities into consumers’ hands. The Nokia 700, 701 and 600 phones are already available in Asia, specifically Thailand that we know of, and Nokia is viewing Asia as a massive market for near field communications. Nokia has also announced some NFC capable peripherals like the Play 360 speakers, Wireless Music Receiver a handsfree headset, and this last week Nokia unveiled its new Essence Bluetooth stereo earbuds that connect using near field communications. Outside of payments, Nokia has positioned itself as the biggest supporter of near field communications to date. However, there has been some doubt on future handsets with Nokia’s switch to the Microsoft WP7 platform.

Nokia commits to NFC in all future mobile phones

The Bangkok Post had the opportunity to interview an executive from Nokia and learned that the company intends to include near field communications chips in all upcoming phones, including Windows Phone 7 devices. Ilari Nurmi, a Vice President of Nokia, said the company was moving aggressively to promote the near field communications system.

“From now on, all of our products will have an NFC chip inside. All other NFC-equipped devices can also link to our products,” he said adding that the Asia-Pacific would be a major market. ”After bringing our Symbian Anna features to Symbian users two months ago, we are now driving the new Symbian Belle platform to enhance our users’ experience,” said Nurmi.

Just last week Nokia upgraded the Nokia C7 with the Symbian Anna update and enabled NFC. All of the phones that have just been released feature the upgraded Symbian Belle OS which also builds upon and features near field communications and a major feature.  However, Nokia has been battling to keep consumers interested in Symbian as they have publicly announced that they will not continue to support Symbian. Mark Selby, the Vice President for Multimedia, said Nokia strongly believes Symbian will keep growing. The company plans to embed the technology in its Windows Phone 7. ”Symbian will never die,” Selby added. Perhaps Nokia will take features from Symbian and build them into their WP7 NFC devices, but Nokia’s latitude is somewhat compromised in development now that the company is moving totally over to a Microsoft OS.

We hope to see Nokia continue to embrace and build upon its great start with near field communications. Dan Balaban, over at NFC Times, reported that Nokia plans to include secure elements to allow payments in future devices. Microsoft is rumored to be developing its own near field communications mobile wallet which is said to launch with Windows Phone 8 OS in 2012. The news today, however, is that Nokia will in fact include NFC in its upcoming Windows Phone 7 devices.