You are complaining that there are to few NFC phones on the market? Well here is an idea, on how to do that yourself:

This actually also was the idea of six students at our University in Hagenberg, studying Embedded Systems Design. They decided to head for a project where they are integrating NFC technology in the open-source mobile phone “Neo-Runner” (aka Open-Moko). Therefore during the summer holidays already a prototype using the Open-Moko and the OpenPCD has been used to gain RFID Functionality on the phone.

The project is run under the supervision of Prof. Dr. Josef Langer, who is also Head of the NFC Research Lab in Hagenberg. The overall Goal of the project is to implement a reference design for an NFC device. Thus there are several challenges to overcome

1. Of course, connect the NFC-Controller somehow to the phone. This wasn’t a big issue, as the phone has a I2C interface, that allowed us to connect NXP’s NFC Reference Board using a serial connection.
2. Secondly we do need a driver for talking to the Reference board. This is currently work in progress. Also the students are currently dealing with the antenna design for the device.
3. Upcoming challenges are the redesign of the hardware to fit into the tiny slot above the SIM-Card into the back of the mobile as well as integrating the antenna into the device. The Reference design also includes a connector to the UICC using the Single Wire Protocol (SWP).

The project is now up and running for 8 weeks and we are hopefully able to present the first prototype at the NFC Congress 2009 in Hagenberg. I’ll keep you posted on the progress of this project. In case this project turns out to be a successfully intergration, the next device we are heading for is the N810, as it is also based on Linux ;-)

Serial Connector smoothly integrated into the back of the phone 

NFC Hardware using the I2C Interface of the phone.

OpenMoko Reading a Mifare Card