Intel Medfield Android NFC Tablet?

Intel Medfield Android Tablet shows NFC by mistake? Or was it a “Microsoft aren’t the only ones with an NFC tablet moment”?

Last week Microsoft held their developer conference and Intel held theirs. It turns out both were showing off NFC tablets.

An NFC tablet is rarer than NFC phones at the moment. In fact, they are as rare as Sarah Palin at a Planned Parenthood clinic opening. Last week, we think it’s fair to say that there was a fair amount of hurrah surrounding the Microsoft announcement that let the world know that Windows 8 would feature NFC. They even gave away NFC tablets to conference attendees to prove it. Strangely enough, at that very same time Intel was holding its developer conference also. We all heard the news that Google would optimize Android so that it would support Intel processors.

Oh yes, and Microsoft were showing off tablets that feature NFC and run nicely on ARM processors. At that very same time Intel was showing of its new Medfield chip at its developer forum and Andy Rubin took to the stage to show an Intel, or should we say no name manufacturer, tablet running Android. The official takeaway news from the Intel Developer Forum was that all versions of Android from this point will support Intel processors starting with the Medfield, which is Intel’s latest Atom chip. What no one expected was for this reference design tablet to be an NFC tablet, and indeed this was not announced at the event.

NFC logo spotted on the back of prototype slate. So was it an NFC tablet?

A reference design is a far cry from a mass production model. A tablet that shows off an NFC logo on the back doesn’t make it an NFC Tablet either. It makes sense that Android is working towards producing NFC tablets, because the opportunities for NFC in retail are huge and it is something that the iPad currently does not do. It doesn’t matter if Microsoft has an NFC tablet that is a year off coming to market. The iPad is here and now dominates the tablet market. That is who both Intel and Google would like to disrupt and capture some of that market share.

Unlike the Windows 8 NFC tablets, we should see the first Intel Medfield / Android NFC tablets in the first quarter of 2012.  Interestingly, a program called “Compute Continuum” was announced as an effort by Intel and partners to get devices to work better together, regardless of platform or OS. NFC certainly would fit that bill and this could be the reason that the Medfield Android NFC tablet was touting a logo.