Originally Posted by
Ma Rio It's weird. At first it's main purpose was sharing files I guess, and later it grew into other things. But it's still not a big thing I think.
I mean, the thing that I hate the most is that it's actually just an initiator. If you want to transfer a file from one phone to another (lets say 2 Lumias) it's not going to do anything on it's own. It requires a lot of work and at the end it just transfers it over bluetooth. I mean wtf... if i wanted to transfer it over bluetooth I wouldn't even bother going to NFC. I can guess it's the same thing with Android beam.
So I also agree that it's just another radio that drains battery and doesn't do much. I keep it off at all times.
The one "theoretical" advantage is using it like this, for protocol "handshake". Because the proximity requirement is so low, it's hard for someone to hack this.
So, if you say exchanged public/private keys, to encrypt some data via Bluetooth, you could design a system that would be easy to sync, and pretty difficult to compromise, without someone noticing.
As some mentioned, some of the NFC protocols work great in their devices, others not so much. I suspect there has been little investment into solid implementation for most devices, and and not a ton of testing.
The one exception is the tap-to-pay, that does seem to be ramping up pretty quickly.
