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TecTiles: programmable NFC stickers for select members of Samsung's Galaxy
NFC's a curious thing. That once heavily buzzed about feature's found a home in many of the handsets that occupy Android's swiftly rotating throne, but eager users wielding those enabled devices haven't been given much to do with it. Visa's payWave aside, Samsung's finally cooked up a means of making the near field tech a more integrated and efficient aspect of our modern lives -- well, the lives of other Galaxy S III, Galaxy S II (T-Mobile only), Galaxy Nexus, Nexus S 4G and Galaxy S Blaze 4G owners, to be precise. Enter: TecTiles. In tandem with its flagship's impending US launch, the company's going to be offering packs of branded NFC stickers at retail that can be programmed with useful actions and placed wherever adhesive is welcome. Need to set up a seamless Foursquare check-in for your place of business, leave a message on the fridge for members of your family, effortlessly transfer your contact info or even silence your phone automatically at a meeting? That's where Sammy's stickers come in handy, sidestepping the multitude of taps it normally takes to enter data or navigate a mobile UI with a simple close encounter of the NFC kind. If the implementation sounds eerily familiar, that's because you may have seen it before in the form of Smart Tags -- Sony's own spin on the communication tech. As you might imagine, there's an app to manage each individual TecTile's settings that will be made available after an initial pairing. And, according to one of the company's reps, each unlocked sticker can be programmed up to 100,000 times, a high enough ceiling that should get you plenty of mileage, glue willing. Naturally, there's a limit to this initial rollout's NFC-love and that's where things could get pricey, given that each TecTile can currently carry only one function at a time. Plans are underway, however, to expand beyond this limitation by enabling multi-functions in future iterations of the tacky tech -- whenever version 2.0 touches down. For now, though, you'll have to make frugal use of the stickers, considering they'll be marked at $15 for a pack of five. So, if you're still standing undecided on a Galaxy S III purchase despite its litany of capabilities, then this long-overdue feature could very well prove to be the wallet-tipping point. %Gallery-158101%
LG's Optimus LTE gets NFC variant, wants to be known as Optimus LTE Tag
The original Optimus LTE caught our eye with its 4.5-inch AH-IPS display, but now LG is throwing something different into the mix: a lower-specced version that does away with that lovely 326ppi display and then attempts to make up for it with the addition of NFC. This lets the handset communicate with "special stickers" that automatically switch its settings to suit a particular location. Put a sticker on your dash and you can set it to switch on the handset's Bluetooth and GPS, for example, as well as boost the volume. It's hardly a new concept, but LG's marketing mavens reckon it merits a full relaunch in Korea under the name "Optimus LTE Tag," and who are we to tell them otherwise? Read on the full specs in the PR.
