New iPhone Prototypes Have Integrated NFC chips and Antenna 114
zacharye writes "Apple's next-generation iPhone will feature an integrated NFC chip according to a new report, suggesting the Cupertino, California-based company may soon make its entrance into the mobile payment space. A report from 9to5Mac states that an analysis of code from Apple's latest iOS software includes references to an integrated NFC chip and antenna."
NFC and hacking (Score:1)
Re:NFC and hacking (Score:5, Funny)
So this is why Apple is backing off on their claims of virus immunity. NFC is a big target.
That's OK, you'll have to hold it a special way to get it to work.
It's a feature, not a bug.
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I like a smart phone...I don't need it to be a 'tap' to my money. I have a perfectly good, physical wallet that I trust way more than this.
I prefer to pay most things in daily life with cash. I don't need or want any more credit than I have (and I have TONS available to me)....I don't want to make it easier to have my cash sucked out of me, especially by someone setting up a rec
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I have a Galaxy Nexus with the feature, and it's a simple option in the Settings menu to turn it off.
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Well, cashless transactions aren't the only reason for this. It would be great for when your screen breaks, you could move all the data from the broken phone to the replacement easily.
As to cashless transaction, it wouldn't affect me at all, because I'm not going to be keeping financial info on a phone, anyway (I won't even bank or pay bills by internet).
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We are referring to the OS with a kernel jailbreak that could be activated by a webpage. You decide.
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this is a security vulnerability but it is not one for viruses.
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So this is why Apple is backing off on their claims of virus immunity. NFC is a big target.
Oh, the good old days when people simply wrote "First Post!" instead of some nonsense that sounds like it could be on topic.
Insane! (Score:5, Insightful)
The Apple smartphone will finally have feature-parity with other smartphones one-to-two generations after the fact? This must have never happened before!
Re:Insane! (Score:5, Funny)
The Apple smartphone will finally have feature-parity with other smartphones one-to-two generations after the fact? This must have never happened before!
Yea, but it wasn't "innovative" before Apple started doing it...
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At least it's not proprietary, which was their direction when Google released NFC in the Nexus.
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You might be eating your words when it comes out. We are talking about Apple remember.
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Indeed. So it'll require an iTunes account and Apple will take 30% of all transactions for "bringing you more customers".
How you integrate also counts as innovation (Score:1, Insightful)
Badly implemented features that are first to market are often less important than implementing the feature correctly.
An example is the iPod. The click wheel and master/slave method of managing music was, in the terminology of biology, an overwhelmingly successful adaptation. The MP3 player market effectively ceased to exist. There was just the iPod market. What they did was make it really, really, really, really easy to play your music. Creative Zen, on the other hand, added buttons. And more buttons. And m
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Re:How you integrate also counts as innovation (Score:5, Insightful)
So in your mind a set of buttons arranged in a circle is "the same" as a rotating disc that is used to navigate a menu on a screen?
I can see your problem!
Of course, you left out the fact that the Diamond Rio also stole the idea from the automobile, which also has circular design features and buttons.
On a serious point, you're attributing "Apple fan hype" to a product that pretty much reignited Apple (along with the iMac). When the iPod came out no one cared about Apple or their small user and fan base. You're thinking about what they're like now and applying that to the era when the iPod came out - there was no "giant devoted fanbase" fawning over "the next insanely great thing" - there was just a small (admittedly devoted) fanbase who stuck with them through the dark years. It certainly wasn't those tiny minority who propelled the iPod into the stratosphere. It was a genuinely much better product to use (but not technically - there were other players with better sound quality) and it sold like hot cakes, especially when it was released in a Windows compatible format.
There weren't any "suckers" when the iPod came out - Apple's fanbase was almost non existent through years of circling the drain.
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Do you spend your most of your day on Slashdot waiting for someone to insult Apple so you can rush to their defense? Do you spend the rest of the time masturbating to your giant poster of Steve Jobs (or Tim Cook now since jerking off to a dead guy made you feel funny)?
No more time than any other regular poster who has access to the internet.
I spend the rest of the time masturbating to pictures of really aggressive old guys with snarling faces. Nothing else does it for me.
You forgot to log in.
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Dude, you totally missed the point of what made the iPod successful...it was bundled with itunes! The iPod was the first mp3 player to allow people to actually buy their music conveniently in mp3 format. All the other mp3 players just sort of assumed you knew how to pirate music off the internet or rip CDs you bought at a store. Itunes actually gave people a legit way to buy mp3s from the internet. Yeah, sure there were other "music stores" before that but you know damn well they fucking sucked with ridicul
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It was bundled with SoundJam, as I like to call it.
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You might be advised to check your history. The iTunes store was over 18 months after (April 28th, 2003) the first iPod (November 10th, 2001)
Re:How you integrate also counts as innovation (Score:4, Informative)
An example is the iPod. The click wheel and master/slave method of managing music was, in the terminology of biology, an overwhelmingly successful adaptation.
Obviously you've never heard of WinAmp [wikipedia.org] or the Diamond Rio MP3 player, [guim.co.uk] both of which debuted about half a decade before the first iPod. Apple didn't innovate shit, they copied other people's designs then told you, 'hey, look at this awesome new thing we came up with!' and you got down on your knees like a good little sucker.
I think it's obvious that the grandparent was referring to hardware, portable mp3 players. Winamp is utterly irrelevant in this context. And he's not saying that Apple invented the mp3 player--just that they innovated within that (fairly small) market and then with those innovations, practically dominated it. Other mp3 players still existed and continued to be created, but interface-wise, they were poor in comparison.
I'm not sure what he means by master/slave music management. Maybe he means a separate app to manage music irrespective of files. Not knowing the history of iTunes, I'm not sure if it always abstracted files and folders away in favor of songs and albums, but that's also a feature that consumers have generally favored.
The Diamond Rio doesn't have a click-wheel. It has something closer to the older scroll-wheel. The click-wheel (using Apple's terminology for a capacitive scrolling wheel which also had 5 buttons built into the wheel) didn't show up until 2004. I can't find anything that comes very close to it in other portable mp3 players.
The click-wheel was really a turning point for usability, but it probably helped that the iPod had a screen capable of showing multiple menu options/songs. I mean, on that Rio you linked to, how much text even fits on that LCD?
The MP3 player market effectively ceased to exist.
I'm not even going to dignify that ignorant bullshit with a response (beyond calling it out as ignorant bullshit, of course).
Yeah, it was quite an exaggeration. There are still non-Apple mp3 players sold. But they don't get any press to speak of and I can find no indication that they sell particularly well. I've owned several (a Sansa being my favorite) but I tend to fall back to using my iPhone because I always have it with me anyway.
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Obviously you've never heard of WinAmp or the Diamond Rio MP3 player, both of which debuted about half a decade before the first iPod. Apple didn't innovate shit, they copied other people's designs then told you, 'hey, look at this awesome new thing we came up with!' and you got down on your knees like a good little sucker.
The Diamond Rio had a whopping 64 megabytes of storage that, if you felt like dropping the money on it, could be expanded to 128. At best that got you two hours of music. The Nomad (I'm assuming you meant the Nomad and not an MP3 player for Windows....) had more storage than the iPod, but it was physically larger, nearly the size of a portable CD player. Both of those players also required a very slow and clumsy parallel port connection to sync the music and neither came with rechargeable batteries. Let
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Re:Insane! (Score:5, Insightful)
NFC isn't a feature, use-anywhere mobile payments is a feature. NFC+Google Wallet doesn't deliver use-anywhere.
Delivering universal mobile payments is not a technology problem, it's a business problem.
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Unfortunately, the odds of Apple playing nice and working with others to implement a "use-anywhere" that's open and usable by everyone are very low.
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"Playing nice" in this instance doesn't mean making Google, Microsoft or indie developers happy. It means shaking hands with Chase, Citigroup, Bank of America and the Co-Op Interbank Network. Google Wallet plays extremely nice, this doesn't make it successful.
Apple was completely capable of "playing nice" with the record labels, and continues to play nice with the entertainment conglomerates, publishing houses and most software developers (the ones without a political agenda, at least). Technical interop
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Google Wallet doesn't require a credit card. You can use a prepaid card and fill it from a debit card.
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The USA is not the world. Chase, Citigroup, Bank of America and Co-Op Interbank are a small, maybe even tiny, part of the worldwide banking network. You also have giant abominations like Bank of England, Royal Bank of Scotland, Westpac, etc (depending where in the world you are). The real solution, and the one Google took, is to get in with MasterCard or Visa, and leverage the PayPass/PayWave standards by means of a virtual MasterCard or Visa stored on the device, issued by the hardware vendor to the dev
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"The world" already has mobile payments.
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NFC is a feature. Mobile payments is really only a very tiny part of what NFC-enabled phones will able do for us.
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I actually consider a phone NOT having this NFC crap on it...to be a desirable feature in of itself....
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The Apple smartphone will finally have feature-parity with other smartphones one-to-two generations after the fact? This must have never happened before!
To quote Steve Jobs, “It isn’t the consumers’ job to know what they want."
Sadly, that fact is true. The iPad proved it.
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I am a hardcore linux user, and have owned a couple of android phones (currently one) as well as an iphone, ipod touch and a couple of ipads, and I gotta accept that the ipad is one heck of a good tool. Let me elaborate.
The responsiveness of an ipad is way better than any android tablet I have used, for good or bad, the games available to the ipad are way more and better than the ones for android, and please dont missunderstand me, I dont mean quantity, Im talking more about the actual explotation of capabi
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Streaming to a TV via HDMI is achievable via a dongle. Not as elegant to be sure (and not discounting your point, just clarifying a detail) but it is possible.
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If you need an excuse to buy another gadget, check out this...
Second screen applications involve interactivity between smart phones, tablets, or other devices and TV. A second screen application could be a controller for a Google TV application or it could add more functionality to a Google TV application. For example, the YouTube Remote application enables users to browse videos on their smart phone and play them on Google TV
https://developers.google.com/tv/remote/ [google.com]
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Somewhat completely offtopic, but I was pleasantly surprised when I tried the official XBMC remote for Android on my S3 - not only does it work very well as a remote, it automatically added a "stream to XBMC" option to the OS when playing video. With Youtube this is pretty much a non-issue as I've already a Youtube addon for XBMC, but there are other erm... video sites that were very quick to embrace HTML5 on their mobile sites. So you can browse "videos" on your phone and have them display on your telly au
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So what does NFC get me? The ability to pay without my wallet? That's not a big advantage.
Really - what is NFC's advantage for the consumer? So far, all I've seen is payment processors like Google and carriers each eating into the pie (and you thought a merchant account and Paypal was bad?), but what's in it for the consumer?
All I see is it's an electronic credit card. Other than carrying my phone instead of having my wallet (which I might need anyways because it has my bus pass and work RFID cards and medi
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Take A2DP bluetooth for example. Or copy & paste. Or MMS. Nokia offered all for several years before they finally appeared on an iPhone. It was iOS3 actually, released June 17, 2009 when Apple offered those features. The Nokia N95 had those features in March 2007.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IOS_version_history#iOS_3.x:_third_major_OS_release [wikipedia.org]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nokia_N95#Multimedia_features [wikipedia.org]
Re:Insane! (Score:4, Insightful)
Rushing to market with a feature that's barely functional or usable is not Apple's usual style. At least I have confidence that NFC integration into iPhones is not going to be next to useless like it is on other phones.
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They still don't have Swype, so they still suck.
Fun! (Score:4, Funny)
Sweet. Now I don't need to be anywhere near you to steal your personal account information and emulate an RFID "card present" transaction (which doesn't require an ID or any of that other security crap like PINs and stuff)... I'll just wait for your phone to download an update for one of the 100 apps that are set to autoupdate whenever it's within range of a wifi, do an injection attack, and then wait for your personal info to appear in my inbox. Oh Apple, it's nice to finally meet someone who understands me!
-- Your Best Fan, J. Random Criminal
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Wait, application updates aren't digitally signed or at least delivered via SSL?
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In fact, you can't load arbitrary code to an iPhone via a Wifi injection attack.
That's nice you have that opinion. The post I was replying to was implying it can be done.
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for the mp3 player thing:
You know, this is sort of funny. When the first iPods came about I was horrified by their look. I had a flash drive with 3 buttons on it, and I was able to listen music. It couldn't hold all my music for sure. But 1GB mp3 is plenty music. Also, if you have 1-2GB music, you don't really need any "innovative" UI, just a play/pause button and a next/prev track.
And by the time I thought I would need a better stuff, smartphones have come along, where the UI was given on a touch screen, s
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You can't do that even if you want to. Even if your details are saved into the phone, you absolutely *must* enter your password at least once to get it to update. If you update one app then there is a grace period where further updates are allowed without re-authenticating, but the original poster's pie in the sky "just wait for the phone to auto update without user input" is simply not on the cards.
new(!) feature in iOS6 (Score:1)
You can't do that even if you want to. Even if your details are saved into the phone, you absolutely *must* enter your password at least once to get it to update.
In iOS5, what you say is true. If you've been following the threads of developers testing iOS6 you will have read that one of the changes in iOS6 Beta 1 (haven't read yet whether it's still there in today's Beta 2) is that you are never prompted for your password when you download an update of an App.
I do wonder if Apple's intent behind this change was just to allow Apple and App developers to auto-install security updates on your device in much the same way that the latest beta of Mountain Lion removes (1
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Obviously, it's not something anyone can exploit without some expert knowledge. Since banks insure for theft and there are detailed audit trails for any money spent, you have little to worry about should your phone's NFC get hacked. Just pick your bank wisely.
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Under IOS 6, you no longer have to enter your password to update apps that are already on your phone. An attack vector? Perhaps, but at least you still have to initiate the download yourself..there isn't any automatic updating feature. I'm personally glad to see this...it's not like the average user really has any idea what the update will do other than "bug fixes".
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You must have not met a "random J criminal" they are so stupid they can barely operate a calculator let alone a sophisticated device.
They cant figure out how to get past the simple video camera or home security alarm from ADT....
Yeah, I have no worries at all about this, because it can be easily turned on and off with a setting.
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If only software engineer had devised some sort of method to ensure that code ran on the OS had not been tampered with. And if only Apple engineers had heard of it [apple.com].
If somebody ever comes up with such a clever method to foil J. Random Criminal's cunning ploy, I suggest we call it something that brings to mind the analogy with real-world
Follow the leader (Score:2, Informative)
Whoa, don't tell me Apple is playing follow the leader with Google [android.com]. I thought Apple always thinks of everything first, and this is why they like to sue everybody.
Re:Follow the leader (Score:4, Insightful)
Yes, except the crucial difference is Apple is going with a standard for a change (unlike Google's original implementation).
And I know it's a tired old meme, but Apple rarely thinks of anything first. The reason that they're so successful is that they are very effective at judging what the consumer wants, and refining things that already exist but could be easier to use/more fun/more refined (all in one computer, portable music player, tablet computer, smartphone etc).
Re:Follow the leader (Score:4, Informative)
Apple is going with a standard for a change (unlike Google's original implementation).
Google Wallet is an implementation of MasterCard's Paypass, which is a standardized variant of EMV. There's nothing non-standard about Google's implementation. They had to choose MasterCard Paypass, Visa Paywave or Discover Zip so that it would work on the already-deployed acceptance devices, but all three are basically interoperable and all are based on EMV standards. I'm sure Paypass was selected based on who was interested in partnering, though I don't actually know how that choice was made.
(Note: I work for Google, on technology related to Wallet. I also worked in the smart card and NFC industry for nearly 15 years before joining Google.)
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That is interesting information to know. Like a man in orthopeadic shoes, I stand corrected.
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Yes, except the crucial difference is Apple is going with a standard for a change (unlike Google's original implementation).
To be fair to Google. I don't think that was their intent, it was initially just a bug on their part that was eventually fixed over the air.
And yes, Android has bugs on occasion, just like iOS has bugs on occasion as well.
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I also don't believe Apple are in the business of suing people all that much
Wow, no wonder you posted anon.
obviously (Score:2, Interesting)
anybody who watched the keynote and saw the passbook feature of ios6 had to know this was coming
What is NFC? (Score:1)
After reading TFA and other sources, I still am not clear on what the NFC chip does, and what its benefits are...... ?
Re:What is NFC? (Score:4, Informative)
It's a very (very) short range RFID chip. It can read/respond to RFID tags like those found on credit cards ("swipe to pay"), and so can become a replacement for your credit cards or other bank cards. The idea is, one day, instead of carrying a wallet you'll just carry your phone and pay for everything that way.
It has other uses too, like using an RFID tag to trigger certain behaviors in a phone (eg: putting one behind the phone cradle in your car, which triggers bluetooth, opens navigation, turns vibration off, etc etc) but they're secondary as far as the general public is concerned.
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It's a money draining technology. It's great if you're on the receiving end or insanely rich.
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I had to go go Google to look it up. Would it KILL people to not assume that everyone knows every damned acronym in the universe when they submit articles?
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NFC by itself, doesn't do much, but layer it with other technologies, and that's when some of its benefits really shine through.
For instance, combine NFC with Bluetooth, and pairing with a Bluetooth headset (even one that your phone has never paired with before) becomes as simple as unlocking your screen lock, and tapping the back of your phone to your Bluetooth headset (the screen lock in this case is usually used as a precaution that you do not accidentally trigger NFC events on your phone when your phone
NFC is pointless when everyone has Bluetooth 4.0 (Score:2)
I don't understand why people think Apple will have anything to do with NFC when they have already been setting things up for quite some time to use Bluetooth 4.0 for the same applications.
Why have both? All Apple needs to do is push stores to offer bluetooth 4.0 compatible equipment, which should cost about as much as NFC handling equipment... and it's not even like Bluetooth is not a standard.
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I don't understand why people think Apple will have anything to do with NFC when they have already been setting things up for quite some time to use Bluetooth 4.0 for the same applications.
Why have both? All Apple needs to do is push stores to offer bluetooth 4.0 compatible equipment, which should cost about as much as NFC handling equipment... and it's not even like Bluetooth is not a standard.
I don't necessarily believe its how Apple sees it, but IMO, from the very start until today, Bluetooth is all hype, a cool word for a technology that had a narrow window of usefulness that is somehow clinging to the perception of relevance. Except for wireless peripherals like mice and keyboards, every other implementation is a poor match. I have yet to hear or hear of any Bluetooth headset that do not make the audio of your cell call sound about half as good as landlines from the 1920's, and the experience
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I agree with you about higher-end bluetooth connectivity, and about bluetooth headsets specifically (I dislike them). That part is not working out too well.
But the lower power mode in 4.0 is perfectly suited to a whole host of devices that require minimal connectivity, payment systems among them... but also many other kinds of sensors that need to be able to run on solar or years on a battery.
Bluetooth 4.0 and NFC are both new - but Bluetooth 4.0 is in a LOT more iOS devices at this point than there have b
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Bluetooth was very useful on my last two phones. It was the easiest way to send photos and home movies and backups of the address book and sound recordings to the computer, since neither phone had wifi. It works fine for those purposes, the dongle I had to get for the PC was worth the $20.
I'm sending a bluetooth dongle to my daughter for her computer, since her iPhone has wifi but it can't be used for sharing files with her computer (had a conversation with her about that the other night, she has no interne
End of NFC then (Score:1)