Chris M.

In February, 2014 I wrote an article about Apple's lack of support of NFC and their use of Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) based iBeacons . Well, I was totally wrong! Samsung introduced NFC support in the Galaxy S3 in May 2012. Apple held out until September 2014 when the iPhone 6 was released with NFC support. Since then Apple Pay, using NFC functionality on the iPhone to make payments, has gotten huge.

For those that haven't heard the news yet, it looks like Near Field Communication (NFC) is going to have a bad 2014. The introduction of Apple's iBeacon  may be the beginning of the end of NFC . For those unfamiliar with iBeacon or NFC there are some significant technical differences between the two technologies. iBeacon is both a standard set of Application Programming Interfaces, or API, introduced by Apple in iOS7 and a data format for  Bluetooth Low Energy(BLE)  devices. Because iBeacon is built on BLE it means that nearly all Smartphones with BLE radios can support iBeacon. NFC communicates through magnetic induction between two antennas placed close together. The primary differences between the two technologies are that NFC can communicate between a powered device and an unpowered device such as a credit card, while BLE requires two powered devices. NFC devices must be close, >10cm, BLE devices can communicate across dozens or more feet. While several popul...