Tuesday, March 15, 2011

My Anticipated iOS 5 Features - Part 2 - "Beaming"

What is "Beaming"?
Long before iPhone got introduced in 2007 by Apple, PDA dominates the gadgets market. One of the neat features of Palm OS PDA is allowing the sending of a contact to another Palm OS PDA by just pressing and hold on to the "Contacts" hard button. No configuration needed, just press and hold for half a second.


As an owner of multiple iOS devices (iPhone 4 and iPad), I currently find it a pain to transfer files and URLs from my iPhone 4 to my iPad and vice versa. I normally resort to using a "cloud" based solution like Dropbox to exchange my files between my iDevices.
However, there's a problem here when there's no internet connection for my iPad. I'm having a WIFI-only iPad.

So, what I'm hoping for in iOS 5 is to have Apple adopting the NFC (Near Field Communication) technology to allow exchange data, files, URLs, etc between iOS devices. This is particular useful in Singapore where majority of the smartphone users are using the iPhone.

So, why not using Bluetooth? Why NFC?
Bluetooth connection still needs a considerable time to establish the link between the 2 devices. NFC needs just 0.1s compared to Bluetooth's 6s.

A major disadvantage of NFC is that the data transfer is about 5 times slower than the Bluetooth transfer rate. But if the uses are just limited to URLs, contact infos or small picture file exchange, the data transfer rate of 424kbit/s for the NFC is really fast enough.

Read also:
My Anticipated iOS 5 Features - USB Mass Storage

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