Nintendo Wii U controller to rock NFC to enhance gaming

Posted by Seth Planck

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Nintendo Wii U controller to rock NFC to enhance gaming

NFC got another boost today as Satoru Iwata, President of Nintendo, announced that the Wii U controller would feature NFC “function”. The Wii U controller is set to be compatible with both FeliCa for its home audience and MIFARE for the rest of the world. The President of Nintendo even acknowledged that NFC “is expected to be widely used around the world in the near future.”

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NFC Fruit Ninja game joins Angry Birds Magic on Nokia NFC phones

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NFC Fruit Ninja game joins Angry Birds Magic and is preinstalled on Nokia NFC phones

NFC gaming is coming of age and that becomes more poignant as Halfbrick Studios releases an NFC version of their hit Fruit Ninja game for Symbian Belle Nokia NFC phones.  Noknok reported back at the end of August that both Angry Birds Magic and NFC Fruit Ninja will come pre-installed on all Symbian Belle Nokia NFC phones. That at the moment includes the Nokia 600, Nokia 700 and Nokia 701 NFC phones. The concept of using NFC to share gaming isn’t new. In fact, even when we go back to the MIT video which showed a day with NFC we saw NFC gaming played on a subway.

However it has taken until 2011 for that dream of NFC-enabled games to hit phones and games like NFC Fruit Ninja are creating a lot of excitement among gamers. Rovio’s Angry Birds Magic NFC game was the first to be announced and was made available to Nokia C7, or Nokia Astound as its known here in the States, owners.

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Did Nokia just out its Nokia 801 Symbian Belle NFC phone by mistake?

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Unannounced, previously unseen Nokia 801 Symbian Belle NFC phone shown in demo video at the IFA trade show

Some are a calling it the Nokia 801 NFC phone, others thinks it’s the Nokia N8-01. Whatever you want to call it, a video being shown at the IFA trade show in Berlin was showing off a 3D render of an NFC phone we haven’t seen before. A particularly svelte looking piece of NFC loving hardware at that, and with Nokia’s own brand of industrial design cues that would make Apple weep into their big pot of money.

We want to preface this post by letting you know this falls into the dubious rumor category at this point, but could be a real NFC phone we are yet to see come to fruition. No one can say that IFA hasn’t had its share of drama this year with the 7″ Samsung slate being pulled from the floor and now the sighting of what appears to be a previously unseen Nokia Symbian Belle NFC phone. The show has been akin to a tiara tantrum at a beauty pageant this year which we find most amusing, we have to say.

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NFC hotspot graphic download

Posted by Thomas Gamboa

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We are giving away an NFC hotspot graphic we developed for one of our projects

Download your copy of our NFC hotspot image. Over here at NFC Rumors, we are always developing something or other and one of projects at the moment involves a smart poster we are putting together. We had a look about online and found there really isn’t any smart poster hotspot graphics available for anyone wanting to design a marketing piece for themselves and so we developed our own (which isn’t unusual around here.) The editor took one look at it and said we should give it away on the site to NFC Rumors readers and so that’s what we are doing. We’re providing the NFC hotspot graphic as a vector image (EPS) a Photoshop file (PSD) and as a transparent image (PNG) so there should be a version that works for you.

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Nokia Symbian Belle announced with NFC features

Posted by Seth Planck

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Nokia Symbian Belle announced with NFC features for new Nokia 700, 701 and 600 plus many more Nokia smartphones

The Nokia news is coming hard and fast today, and joining Nokia’s new NFC phone is the latest, greatest and probably last rendition of the once mighty Symbian mobile OS. Nokia announced Symbian Belle today exactly as it promised on its Facebook page earlier this week. This new upgrade news comes just over one week after the Nokia C7 Astound, Nokia N8, Nokia C7, Nokia C6-01 and Nokia E7 got access to Symbian Anna and the C7 had its NFC turned on for the first time. Nokia’s Symbian Belle builds on those strengths and then some, so let’s look at what’s new.

Nokia Symbian Belle features

The first thing to know is that many of the new features revolve around NFC. Not all the phones that will be eligible for the Symbian Belle upgrade will have an NFC chip installed so obviously won’t be able to benefit from that specific set of functions. First out of the gate is Symbian’s new 6 home screen setup which works very much like an iPhone’s different screens for you to store apps and widgets. The second new feature is the dynamic widgets which ships with live widgets for chat, email and social updates that are housed straight on one of those six new fancy home screens.

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Nokia announces three new NFC phones the Nokia 700, Nokia 701 and Nokia 600 all toting Symbian Belle

Posted by Seth Planck

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Nokia announces three new NFC phones the Nokia 700, Nokia 701 and Nokia 600 all toting Symbian Belle

Nokia today trotted out not one, not two, but three new NFC phones. The Nokia 700, the Nokia 701 and the Nokia 600 are official and are all touting Symbian Belle and are all NFC smartphones. We have covered all of these NFC phones in our rumors over the last couple of months, but it’s great to see them all come to market with a bang. Whereas the specifications hadn’t altered much from the leaked roadmap we reported on a month or so ago, there are certainly more details available starting with the release date. Nokia has said that the NFC phones will be released in the third quarter and we have heard that it could be as soon as the next few days when we get some carrier details. These may be the last days of Symbian and a non-Microsoft Nokia, but it appears they are going out with a bang. So, without further ado let’s get down to the nitty gritty details you love.

Nokia 700 / Nokia Zeta NFC phone

Up until today, we have known the Nokia 700 as the Zeta. Nokia is claiming that the Nokia 700 NFC phone is the world’s most compact monoblock smartphone. With dimensions of only 50 cubic centimeters, weighing 96gm and at 110 x 50.7 x 9.7 mm, it isn’t going to weigh you down or bulge your pockets.

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Symbian Anna available for download brings NFC to Nokia C7 Astound

Posted by Seth Planck

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Symbian Anna available for download brings NFC to C7 Astound

We reported that the C7 Astound would have its Symbian Anna NFC chip turned on some time ago. It’s taken its sweet time but Nokia today released its Symbian Anna update for the Nokia N8, Nokia C7, Nokia C6-01 and Nokia E7. We, however, are only interested in one of those phones and the new NFC capability that the update brings. The Nokia C7 / Astound has been the equivalent of a flightless bird since launch. It has the NXP NFC chip inside but that chip has been well and truly powered off until today. Owners of the Nokia C7 Astound can now start to enjoy some of the benefits that Symbian Anna and NFC have to offer inclusive of the NFC-enabled Angry Birds game. NFC tags have also become readable and writable as well as a whole host of other uses. What won’t be available is mobile payments. The Nokia C7 Astound doesn’t have a secure element built in, nor does it have support for any other form of secure element to be added. With other NFC phones, microSD and NFC SIM cards can be added but Nokia is championing NFC without payments at this time, and from what we have heard won’t change that stance until Windows Phone 8 is launched next year when Nokia is widely expected to launch NFC WP8 phones with NFC secure elements which will probably come from NXP.

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Nokia N9 NFC phone to give America and potentially UK a miss

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Nokia N9 NFC phone to give America and potentially UK a miss

We have been covering the Nokia N9 NFC phone for quite sometime. Nokia’s first and last MeeGo NFC phone made quite the stir when it was introduced, and many people have been waiting in anticipation for its release here in the United States. The guys over at Engadget have been trying every trick in the book to get Nokia to let us all know about a definite release date, as we already know Sweden and Switzerland have theirs and today they got some bad news. Nokia got back to them and said that they had no plans to launch the Nokia N9 NFC phone in the US.

Nokia said, “After the very positive reception to the launch of the Nokia N9, the product is now being rolled out in countries around the world. At this time we will not be making it available in the US. Nokia takes a market by market approach to product rollout, and each country makes its own decisions about which products to introduce from those available. Decisions are based on an assessment of existing and upcoming products that make up Nokia’s extensive product portfolio and the best way in which to address local market opportunities.”

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Nokia Zeta or 700 NFC phone spy shots

Posted by Seth Planck

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Nokia Zeta or 700 NFC phone spy shots

Just last week we got a sneak peek at the Nokia Zeta or, as it may be known, the Nokia 700. It appeared with its hipster NFC phone sister, the Nokia Cindy, which is marketed for the younger crowd and aimed unashamedly at the younger, female crowd. The rumors have suggested that the Nokia Zeta will fly along on the latest version of the Symbian OS Belle, and these couple of spy shots certainly seem to back that rumor up. The OS itself aesthetically looks like a mashup between the MeeGo UI, something Nintendo would cook up with a splash of HTC styling.

Nokia Zeta or Nokia 700 shots

The shots show the Nokia Zeta decked out in white which suggests Nokia is planning to make its new mini NFC smartphone available in a few shades. We can clearly see it sporting what looks to be a brushed aluminum back which sports the 5 megapixel shooter. On the front of the phone there are call, hang-up and home buttons and we can see a front facing camera up top.

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HTC Desire could get NFC compatibility with upcoming Gingerbread update

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Over the last couple of months there has been flip-flop news about whether or not the HTC Desire would get Google’s Gingerbread OS which includes NFC compatibility. Yesterday the company confirmed on its Facebook page that it would indeed be upgrading its HTC Desire to run on Google Android 2.3 Gingerbread.

This is the quote from the company “Hi all- We’re excited to share that we are testing our build of Gingerbread for HTC Desire and will start doing quality assurance for it this week. When we have an update on availability we’ll post another announcement. Thanks for your support!”

HTC is testing Gingerbread on its Desire smartphone at the moment and should be releasing the update over the air within the next few weeks.

HTC Desire Gingerbread rollout date not announced

First released in April of last year the HTC Desire is starting to age, and it was feared that the device would not have enough memory to run on Android 2.3. The company had said it would not be updating the HTC Desire on the 15th of June but changed its mind within an hour and we have been waiting for an update ever since. The smartphone features a 3.7 inch display and zips along with a 1GHz processor and has 512 MB of RAM. The HTC desire ships with Android 2.1, or Eclair, and has a 5 mega pixel shooter with flash and geotagging capability.

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