BlackBerry 3G Playbook with NFC leaks out with 2012 roadmap

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BlackBerry 3G Playbook with NFC leaks out with 2012 roadmap

BlackBerry has had its 2012 roadmap leak this week and among an assortment of NFC smartphones there was a BlackBerry Playbook that rocked on HSPA+ 3G, and is likely to feature NFC if the leaked presentation slides are to be believed. We reported just the other day that BlackBerry had supported NFC in a big way which, since Nokia has said goodbye to NFC at the moment, means the Canadian firm is sitting in pole position for supporting the technology throughout their devices. That support appears to now extend to the firm’s Playbook tablet. The first Playbook came sans 3G data connectivity and was billed as the iPad killer. But without a few fundamentals, like unified mail, the Playbook struggled against the iPad and lately the Android-based devices.

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Google Nexus NFC tablet to cost just $199 and come with a 7″ display?

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Google Nexus NFC tablet to cost just $199 suggests rumors

We reported a couple of weeks ago about Eric Schmidt’s comment to an Italian newspaper that suggested that Google was prepping a Google Nexus NFC tablet that would sport Ice Cream Sandwich. Schmidt told the newspaper in an interview that ”[In the] next six months we plan to market a tablet of the highest quality.” At that time we reached out to Google for clarification of what Eric meant when he made the comment and we hit the steely wall of silence from Google. Generally when we speak with Google we get responses pretty promptly with some pretty helpful information, so to not even get a no comment statement was a little odd.

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Nokia CES Press event hints at NFC and maybe tablets

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Nokia CES Press event hints at NFC and maybe tablets Okay, the Nokia Press invitation just hit our inbox for CES hinting that the firm may well be unveiling some new devices that speak to the future of smart devices. Perhaps it is just fanciful thinking on our part, but we suspect that we may see some Windows Phone [...]

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Eric Schmidt hints at Google Nexus NFC tablet mid 2012

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Eric Schmidt hints at Google Nexus NFC tablet mid 2012

It’s great when Eric Schmidt does an interview, he knows just how to let things slip, and in a recent interview with Italian newspaper, Corriere della Sera, he mentioned a previously unheard of Google Nexus tablet. He added that this tablet would be of the highest quality. We bet it is an NFC tablet due to Google’s massive investment in the technology, but that is pure speculation. On the other hand, because this has been taken from a foreign translation it could merely mean that Google are going to push tablets made by manufacturing partners. Eric Schmidt said via Google translation that “in the next six months we plan to market a tablet of the highest quality.”

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INSIDE Secure supplies Intel with NFC tech and secure elements

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INSIDE Secure supplies Intel with NFC tech and secure elements

Intel has selected INSIDE Secure to supply it with its NFC technology as it moves further into the Near Field Communication industry. In the last few months, Intel has come from being absent in NFC to looking like a main proponent of the nascent technology. It was just last week that they upped their membership status in the NFC Forum to the top level of Sponsor and pulled up a chair at the big table of directors. It was around two months ago that we saw a tablet sporting an NFC logo at an Intel industry event also. One thing for sure is that Intel plans to add ubiquity to NFC, and in doing so will educate consumers about the technology on a mass scale.

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Samsung to launch retina resolution super NFC tablet in February?

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Samsung to launch retina resolution super NFC tablet in February?

Word on the street is that Samsung is prepping a retina resolution super NFC tablet in February that’s due to be released at Mobile World Congress that features impressive specifications. This is a rumor reported over at BGR today. We all know the rivalry between Apple and Samsung has reached fever pitch and there is no love lost. With that in mind, hearing that Samsung is planning on launching a super high resolution NFC tablet before the iPad 3 gets out of the gate is probably not too much of a shock to many. The specifications of this rumored tablet could set it apart from the upcoming iPad 3. The rumor suggests that the new NFC tablet from Samsung will be launched at Mobile World Congress and not at CES. Although that said we received invitations for the Samsung press conference at CES and we wonder if Samsung might give us a sneak peek.

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N-pass Mobile Technology announces dual SIM NFC phones

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N-pass Mobile Technology announces dual SIM NFC phones

Chinese firm N-pass Mobile Technology, a subsidiary of Aisidi, has announced that it is getting into the NFC phone game with a dual SIM handset. N-pass let us know that it has seen massive potential in NFC for sometime, and it has assembled a team of NFC experts to create NFC phones that work on both WCDMA and GSM MNOs the world over.

What is interesting about the direction the firm is taking is that the particular flavors of NFC, in what appears to be feature phones, support card emulation(SWPSIM,SSD), reader / writer mode with standard ISO14443A/B,Mifare, Tags and a mode they call P2P. We assume that to be Peer-to-Peer.

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It’s a good time to be in the NFC IC market says ABI research

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It’s a good time to be in the NFC IC market says ABI research

ABI Research has another report out that focuses on wireless connectivity and suggests that NFC IC manufacturers are in for a boom when they tot up their year-on-year sales at the end of 2011. Most of us have a Bluetooth, GPS and WiFi direct capable smartphone these days. ABI says that in some markets adoption has hit 100%. However, NFC is the new kid on the block and provides a huge growth area for IC manufacturers.

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NXP Working on 10 NFC tablets and 90 NFC phones

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NXP Working on 10 NFC tablets and 90 NFC phones

If ever there was any doubt that NFC tablets were heading our way NXP squashed that misconception at 4G World a couple of weeks ago as Jeff Miles Vice President Mobile Transactions Worldwide at NXP announced that NXP was currently working on over 100 NFC devices that was made up of 10 NFC tablets and around 90 NFC phones. We have some video of this announcement we will put up on the site within the next week or so. However, this shows that tablet manufacturers are starting to see NFC as a must-have feature to be competitive.

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Windows 8 NFC tablets launching 3rd Quarter 2012?

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Windows 8 NFC tablets launching 3rd Quarter 2012? UPDATED

We could be seeing Windows 8 NFC tablets by the third quarter of 2012 according to DigiTimes. Large PC vendors that include Hewlett-Packard and Dell reportedly intend to venture into Windows 8 NFC tablets. What is interesting is the reason why. In short, the reason that Microsoft’s Windows 8 tablets are looking so good to large manufacturers is because of Amazon’s Kindle Fire. The Kindle Fire has begun a price war among Android tablet makers.

The larger tablet manufacturers therefore see Windows 8 NFC tablets the best bet to avoid competition. Although they will pick up licensing fees from Microsoft, which is presumably cheaper than the discounts they would have to give on Android devices.

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Panasonic BizPad NFC tablets announced in 7 and 10 inch flavors

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Yet more NFC tablets for Japan as Panasonic announces a 7 and 10 inch enterprise BizPad

Panasonic is launching their NFC tablets they like to call the BizPad in Japan, and they are coming in both 7″ and 10″ flavors. NFC tablets have been slow to make their way to the United States. Microsoft whet our appetites when the gave out NFC tablets at the Windows 8 Build Developer Conference and apart from that, nada, zip, nothing from any other manufacturer. Although we have heard whispers of an NFC tablet or two making their way to the States before the holidays. At this point, they are still vaporware.

We have already seen Sharp enterprise NFC tablets hit the market in Japan, and Panasonic seems to be following up with its own offerings. The two Panasonic NFC tablets are the 7″ LCD display toting BizPad JT-580VT, and the larger 10.1-inch LCD JT-581VT. Just like the Sharp NFC tablets that came before them, they are only available to the enterprise set. These non-identical twins are rocking Honeycomb instead of Froyo.

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Intel Medfield Android NFC Tablet?

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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.

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Microsoft unveils Windows 8 with NFC support and an NFC tablet

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Microsoft shows off Windows 8 OS with NFC support and an NFC tablet at the BUILD conference

Microsoft have said since last year that they would design Windows 8 to work on tablets, netbooks and PCs, but what they forgot to mention is that the latest and greatest Windows OS would support NFC, which ties in with rumors we have reported on for the last week. Today at the BUILD conference the company showed off the new Windows 8 OS along with a few NFC tablets, notebooks and desktop computers all running the aforementioned preview version of the OS that features the new Metro-Style UI.

NFC tablets, NFC PC’s and NFC laptops are getting ready to hit the market.

BGR reported that Microsoft is giving out a “Samsung Windows Developer Preview PC”, which in actual fact is a Samsung NFC tablet, to 5,000 developers at the BUILD conference. It’s equipped with 4GB of RAM, a 64GB SD card, a microSD card slot, HDMI-out, NFC support, Ethernet and more. AT&T will also provide owners of the tablet with one year of free data service with 2GB of data per month. Be sure to check out the gallery below for shots of all the great hardware Microsoft showed off at BUILD.

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Hewlett Packard is developing NFC tablets & NFC phones

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Hewlett Packard is developing NFC tablets & NFC phones

Bloomberg reports: Hewlett Packard is developing NFC tablets and NFC phones which could launch and be in our hands before the end of the year. HP who purchased Palm last year for a cool $1.2 billion has seeing slipping sales. According to ComScore Inc, Palm’s market share dropped to 2.6 percent in the three months that ended in April, from 3.2 percent in the previous period for its mobile devices.

Hewlett Packard is developing NFC tablets & NFC phones
Hewlett Packard is developing NFC tablets and NFC phones so that customers can make payments with its devices

In the Bloomberg report, it specifically cites mobile payments and coupons as HP’s reason for wanting to develop NFC. What is unclear at this time is whether HP is intending to launch its own payment service or whether it is planning on partnering with a financial partner. Not all handset manufacturers have built their own payment solutions as Google has with its Google Wallet product line, but we will have to wait and see what HP has in mind. Building a payments platform for Palm’s operating system for mobile devices, Web OS, could reinvigorate the brand and attract developers to build apps for the architecture. Hewlett Packard is developing NFC and attracting developers – this could be just what it needs to reverse its fortunes as it flags against strong competition in the space.

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NFC tablets and pads are coming this year

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NFC tablets are coming

The focus is on NFC phones, but let’s not forget NFC tablets and pads. While we wait for NFC to take hold in our consumer products and for it to be embraced and implemented into popular services we use, let’s look at what is to come.

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