From the original blog announcement:
"Really goes to show our commitment to NFC and working on the »chicken and egg« problem so many in the industry are referring to as being one of the challenges stifling NFC takeoff in recent years."
Indeed, and I wish pundits would stop saying that Nokia is behind the times - it's simply not true, with a large number of innovations introduced in the last year.
"As mentioned by one of our senior spokespersons we believe in a gradual approach with focus on enabling simple use cases connected to NFC tags, Easy device pairing and peer-2-peer interactions with support for the »card emulation« use cases (used to enable mobile payments and ticketing) introduced later on."
Many of us had been wondering about that. It's true that getting a full ecommerce implementation sorted with NFC across payment providers and regional boundaries is an order of magnitude (at least) harder than simply transferring data or URLs.
"More on the NFC use cases later. If you have been playing with C7, C7 Oro or C7 Astound with Symbian Anna you will notice quite a few improvements in the NFC experience we introduced in Symbian Belle."
NFC on the C7 is still very new, but it's reassuring that it's even more integrated in Belle, arriving over the next 3 to 4 months.
"I personally like the move from a dedicated NFC Sharing application (where you needed to open a special app to share contacts and media) to instant sharing of contacts and photos. Also what we've done in the new models was improve antenna performance, we preloaded games and apps taking advantage of NFC as well as put NFC tags into the sales box to teach customers the new behaviour paradigm (tap) – what (in this person's opinion) NFC is all about."
Absolutely. This needs to be as simple as 'spot a wireless icon, tap the phone to it'. And well done for the example NFC tags in new device boxes - a great idea.
Not to make existing C7 customers unhappy, we will make all of the SW level improvements available to them via the upcoming Symbian Belle upgrade."
Another confirmation that Symbian Belle will be available as an update to all existing Symbian^3 and Anna handsets.
There's also "a section on the developer portal on NFC: http://developer.nokia.com/NFC . Be sure you bookmark it if you are interested in developing NFC enabled apps! "
Good stuff, there will be much more on NFC here on All About Symbian in the coming month.
Steve Litchfield