Mobile Monday London

Some NFC dissent yesterday at Mobile Monday, with one chap saying he was privy to the road-maps of two major phone manufacturers, and that neither had any plans for NFC on the horizon, which could throw a bucket of water on the predictions of mass-market NFC by 2009. This seems extremely credible - major manufacturer road maps are public for much of the rest of this year and NFC isn't on them.

It took 6 years for J2ME to get really ubiquitous, how can NFC hope to beat that in 2 years when there are no NFC devices at all, half way through 2007 - outside of a handful of developers such as ourselves working in the mobile payments space, who get the imported trial handsets available only with Finnish Manuals?

(anybody heard of the first end-user getting an NFC phone in the West without being on a sponsored NFC trial?)

NFC is a good technology, can do great things in industry, and may well have some really persuasive services for end users, but I really wouldn't pin my 2009 mobile service development strategy on the availability of end-user NFC.

Most useful things that NFC could do can already be achieved with today's technology, if the will is there.