HP contemplating adding NFC to future webOS devices? 45
Mon, 13 Jun 2011 6:20 pm EDT 
We’ll be honest, HP’s Touch-to-Share technology is pretty slick stuff, but the fact that it’s marketed as an extension of Touchstone tech is telling: it’s proprietary. Contrast that with the open standard Near Field Communication spec, which is seeing a strong push from Google. The difference between the two is that HP’s vision was for sharing between devices you own, while Google wants NFC to open up to sharing with your friends and retailers – it’s both a handshake and a wallet.
Enter Bloomberg, citing two people familiar with HP’s plans, with the claim that HP is considering adding NFC tech to future webOS phones and tablets, which would allow the owner to not only to share between their phone and tablet, but also to other devices and the aforementioned retail purchases (not to mention a thousand other possibilities). The new devices could be available by the end of 2011, though if the TouchPad and/or Pre3 achieve any modicum of success, we wouldn’t expect the Touchstone v2 version of sharing to go away any time soon.
Source: Bloomberg; Thanks to everybody that sent this in!
45 Comments
Great if they include both technologies: Touch-To-Share and NFC. TTS between webOS devices, NFC for the others!
OMG TTS and NFC, like OMG! webOS FTW!
Isn't it sad that people actually understand the #$%# I just wrote?
What's "OMG"?
OMG, u don'k know what OMG is? Even my BFF ROFL'd because she was like, OMG! What?
The sad thing is I've seen kids turn in school papers written like that; which caused the teacher to mutter "omg".
You're a girl! Or at least, I hope you are. lol!
I'm not, but my wife gave birth to one and I tutor off and on on the side.
Sorry, I meant to say, "OMG! No. As if! WhatEVERRRRR!" :-)
lol...ok...that explains the BFF then.
To show how out of touch I am, for the longest while, I thought BFF meant "Best Female Friend" since I only heard girls use it. But it seems the real meaning is not gender specific.
It's 'Best Friend Forever', and only girls use it. I mean, you won't hear guys going around saying 'He's like, you know, my BFF! And you totally can't, like, mess with him, or whatever!'. ;D
LOL
WTF you guys...?
-Suntan
"could be available by the end of 2011"
cue the Sprint whining.
NFC would be nice. But I can't help to find it laughable HP is discussing future features for future phones that might be delivered "someday" after the currently unreleased "sometime this summer" future phones.
In the meantime HP completely ignores their actual current users of their actual current devices who might not wait the future phone much less the future after the future phones.
I hope they do include in future devices but in the short-term I'm happy to have TTS. As much as good is pushing NFC I think it is still at least 1-2 years from somewhat broad adoption and probably 2-4 years from wide adoption. I don't need to be an NFC early adopter.
Android is doing it. There is evidence that the next round of Blackberries will support NFC. There are rumors that Apple is working on supporting it.
My question is, why give all these guys more time beat you to market...again? NFC is not exactly "new tech". TTS should have been implemented with NFC+Bluetooth.
I agree. My question is why have TTS if you have NFC? Seems like a waste of space and cost. What does TTS bring that NFC can't do? Also, most of the rest of the world has been using NFC in one form or another for the last couple of years. It is just new tech in the U.S.
By the end of 2011? I'll have some of what Bloomberg is smoking.
The assumption would have to be that they've been working on this all along. If that's the case, implementing TTS without NFC seems like a waste.
HP uses Bluetooth for the transfer of the actual Touch-To_Share data between devices. Additional HP technology is used to automate and speed up the Bluetooth handshaking protocols. Guess what? NFC does just that - i.e sensing device proximity, automating and speeding up the Bluetooth handshaking process. However HP in their wisdom decided to use a technology extremely similar, yet incompatible to NFC, at a time when NFC was getting into more and more phones. Why? Who knows. They have been sponsoring the NFC forum since 2006. Why they decided to go against an already established standard that they should be aware of is just beyond me. Now they have to play catch up in their next set of hardware rather than just do a firmware/software upgrade of the Pre3 and the Veer.
This.
As soon as I saw TTS, I thought, cool, NFC initiated transfers. Then TTS was explained. Sigh. Such a missed opportunity.
It reminds me of their decision to leave compasses out of the first generation of WebOS phones just before direction/nav/gaming apps really got popular.
Just don't get why you'd relaunch a platform known for lacking on the hardware side and then not meet EVERY spec of devices just dropped and about to drop.
Oh, well....I'm sure busy professionals who need to answer calls on tablets and take URLs with them wherever they go won't have time to waste on stuff like this.
Do RIM's Blackberry products suffer by having a porpriatery communications offering in BBM in addition to using open standards like text? Will Apple suffer likewise by copying this strategy? Having TTS does not eliminate HP from having NFC In their products also. Believe me, HP is much smarter than you give them credit for.
>Believe me, HP is much smarter than you give them credit for.
why should I believe you on this, they do not seem to act like they are that smart. Why it is so, to lure and ambush the competition?
i read somewhere NFC can backwards compatiable and all u had to do was add some rfid stricker to ure phone.... so who knows. maybe pre3 can have it after all -=X
Still not a fan of NFC, no real use for it in my daily life at this point that couldn't be handled by TTS.
The thing is they could have implemented TTS via NFC and given you all that *you* want while not limiting everyone else. If TTS is all you need/want whether it's done with NFC or some proprietary implementation should not make a difference to you but it has implications for anyone with use cases that go beyond HP products.
...like, you know, various possible Enterprise solutions, and potentially hundreds of them...
@taharka, Did I say they shouldn't be considering it? Just making a statement that for me, I don't see the use.
PERSONALLY, there is not one thing I can think of I would/could use it for.
I'm not a fan of either. In a way, this talk of TTS (or NFC really) just seems unimportant right now.
I'd like to see HP talking up synergy or something. Seeing webOS's potential. I just don't get the appeal of tapping devices to send URL's. Reminds me of the wavy launch bar, looks nice but never gets used.
And yep, i know TTS might have its own potential but I'd rather it be automatic, without the tapping.
You do understand that NFC is more than sharing URL's right? With NFC the sky is the limit. It can be used for purchases in stores, entry access, and you can buy a pack of NFC pads and place them around the house, work, whatever and set your phone to initiate something when it reads them. For example. You can place a pad in your doorway at home and have your phone automatically intiate a profile on your phone. Now with TTS, you are right. I think all it does is share URL's. I don't understand its purpose.
The idea of having it around the house cool I guess, not much I could do with it, but would be cool to use it to control mode switcher when I walk in the door, get to work, etc... Then again TS2 will do this for me, and it's still a novelty to me.
For me TTS would mainly be for receiving sms and what not on the TP. I also am waiting to see if TTS is going to be able to be able to be integrated into homebrew and apps in a way where you could utilize data or gps from the Pre3 in a TP app.
In most of the uses I could see myself using NFC for, it's exactly the same as TTS and the TS2. Once again not saying it doesn't have it's uses, just nothing specific for me.
I really don't like the idea of NFC for purchases.
wireless charging, wireless pairing of your phone (touch to share and bluetooth), wireless updates, wifi media sync, wireless synergy, wireless bluetooth music and talk, wireless tethering and now wireless NFC... WebOS/HP are the wireless kings!
Kinda hard to be the "king" of something that one of the leaders of the pack is already doing right now.
Weren't they also contemplating a release of the Pre3 here in the U.S.?
that phone looks like a webos slab
No, the touchstone name is misleading because HP has said that the touchstone tech is only used to identify, it is then handed off to a different tech if beneficial. I see no reason why NFC cannot be integrated into the existing tech. And its still all under the label of Touchstone and Touch to share.
This has been one of the more misleading features of the touchpad.
I do hope to see NFC if nothing else than just another data transfer option.
I didn't think touch-to-share (TTS) and Touchstone had anything to do with each other.
Touchstone is for charging and has an id that tells the device being charged where it is docked (incase the device wants to do something special in exhibition mode, etc.).
TTS is bringing two devices together (Pad and Phone for example) to initiate a transfer (a URL for example).
The compatibility question lies between NFC and the tech used for TTS.
perhaps the highly anticipated Stingray slab will carry NFC.
Dead on Arrival...
Not against innovation or anything but current NFC tech p implementation makes me a little nervous in an identity theft kind of way. You can talk about security all you want but it's simply not a selling point for me.
NFC can be incorporated in a phone without it being used for financial transactions. One might ask what is the point then; just as well use HP's own technology. The problem is though, NFC is a selling point - it is a necessary item on a checklist. And it would not have made much effort or investment for HP to use NFC rather than developing its own wheel for marginally additional functionality (assuming the Touch part of TTC cannot be done via NFC as NFC works by proximity of the induction coils not touching, but Google now uses NFC for similar sharing tech).
One minor detail everyone seems to be overlooking: NFC is primarily designed to handle relatively short bursts of data, such as would be transmitted from an RFID to a receiver in a WalMart store. If TTS is to fulfill the promise alluded to on 2/9, it would require more than small snippets of data.
You are right in that NFC on its own does not have the bandwidth. But neither does HP's proprietory technology (lets call it HP tech). Both NFC and HP tech are used to facilitate data transfer over bluetooth and that is how TTS works.
NFC/HP Tech are used to complement bluetooth because bluetooth on its own does not have the functionality to sense close proximity (it senses proximity from meters away not from millimeters away, which is not what you want), and it has a slow handshake process.
Both HP tech and NFC work in a very similar way. However, I am not sure if NFC could have led to the "touch" part of TTS. So in practice with NFC you would have held the devices very close to each other to initiate sharing -even touch if you wanted to. The upside would have been that NFC could have led to a lot more applications since it is an open standard.
That's great, but how about we actually get some devices out before we start talking about new vaporware...
Shoot, they could even start by announcing some carrier information, I'm really sick of HP's sloooooow release timeline. By the time the pre3 comes out, the Iphone 10 will be out, and android 6.0 will be out...
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