Philips, Nokia, and Sony have decided to suck it up and admit that the current system of wireless gadget-to-gadget communications is terrible. They didn’t use those words exactly, but the announcement of the joint ‘Near Field Communications’ venture indicates that the companies know there is a problem (note picture right, where responsible executives and researchers are led somberly to their execution). NFC isn’t a new wireless protocol. Instead, NFC aims to add an interface layer to all the wireless variants to allow seamless handshakes and communications between wireless devices. Rather than manually configuring devices to use certain protocols, devices would suss out the best method to use between themselves. It’s a great idea, but ‘it will just work’ ideas rarely pan out.
