The shiny new Nexus S, which you can see Aaron unbox right here, is Google's poster child for near field communication support in Android. As of this writing, though, the Nexus S and its NFC chip is only capable of reading a signal, not transmitting one like is necessary with mobile payment services. That'll be changing soon, as NXP, the company behind the NFC chip inside the Nexus S, has said that Android 2.3 and its SDK will be updated in phases and will eventually support the full NFC functionality. There's no word on exactly these updates will come, but NXP says that they'll be included in updates to Gingerbread rather than pushed back for inclusion in the next major Android update.
Why would Google bother including NFC and touting it as a major feature if it's only half-baked right now? Well, El Goog wanted to introduce the feature as soon as it could, says NXP's Charles Dachs, and I can't say I blame them. As it stands, the NFC capabilities in the Nexus S are pretty neat, and it's not like we see a lot of devices with NFC here in the U.S. anyway. Once the Nexus gets its full NFC power, the feature could really pick up and see a more widespread adoption. NFC is integrated into Android 2.3 and there will likely be plenty of phones that support it in the near future, so now I pose this question to you: if your next device had NFC and could make mobile transactions and things like that, would you use it?
