BlackBerry Tag demoed showing off NFC sharing capabilities (Video)

BlackBerry Tag demoed showing off NFC sharing capabilities

BlackBerry Tag is to RIM what Android Beam is to Google. BlackBerry devices started cropping up with NFC chips starting with the BlackBerry Bold 9900 and 9930 a couple of months ago. Since that point all BlackBerry devices that have been launched, with the exception of the newest Torch, have included support for NFC. The software that came along with those BlackBerry NFC phones wasn’t up to the job, as it only recognized a few NFC tag types and has given a generally poor user experience. We have to hand it to RIM for embracing NFC in its BlackBerry phones, but we wish they had refined the NFC tag reading ability more before they launched and marketed their devices as being NFC capable.

As we reported a few weeks ago, most of the bugs have been worked out. We heard an update to the OS called 7.1 is set to fix many of the problems that BlackBerry owners faced attempting to use NFC. BlackBerry announced a little while ago that it had developed an app straight into the OS that handled sharing of information between phones that it called BlackBerry Tag. Aside from the announcement that BlackBerry Tag existed, we have seen little else about the feature until today. The guys over at intomobile scooped a brief demo, which highlighted the new capabilities and demonstrated that the NFC problems are a thing of the past for the most part.

BlackBerry Tag demonstration shows data sharing using NFC between a BlackBerry Curve and BlackBerry Bold 9900 series

We have to say by the looks of the demonstration RIM has built some solid functionality and support into BlackBerry Tag. The BlackBerry Tag demo video shows photo sharing and contact sharing with the ability to bypass annoying confirmation alerts. BlackBerry Tag supports an impressive array of supported file formats including the ability to transfer ringtones, voice notes, contacts, images, videos, calendar items, documents, spreadsheets, PowerPoint presentations, PDFs, and URL’s. The fellow on the demonstration also notes that developers will have the ability to add to that list of supported NFC transactions of data types. Check out the BlackBerry Tag NFC prowess in the video below.

Many MNOs have NFC locked off at the software level at the moment, which is partially due to the previous poor experience and in part due to MNOs’ own agendas. What we don’t know is whether NFC will be enabled on networks as BlackBerry Tag is released into the wild. We certainly hope it is. We also haven’t yet seen how BlackBerry Tag does reading NFC tags, which was a sore subject with NFC BlackBerry owners before. intomobile  reports that BlackBerry will be officially writing a blog post announcing the deployment of its NFC BlackBerry Tag update soon.