Harri Salminen's Forum Nokia Blog

Random thoughts about mobile (enterprise) application development.

Where are new RFID terminals?

widianuser | 28 November, 2006 00:22

Last year I was asked about the possibility to use RFID-tags with Nokia terminals. I did some research and found out that there were two devices in the market that supported separate accessory RFID-shells. The problem with those shells was that you were locked in to Nokia's NFC server solution; there was no option that you buy the terminal, shells, RFID-tags and set up your own system. That wasn't acceptable for us and RFID solution was ignored.

Now, after 18 months, the situation is the same. There are no new devices supporting RFID, Forum Nokia has no documentation about RFID and the server lock-in is probably still there (I haven't verified the server situation, this is typically something that you can't read from marketing documents).

I wonder why the situation is like this? RFID solutions would offer great possibilities for field-force systems, asset management, work assignment systems etc. With RFID tags the need to type in data with terminal's small keypad in probably stressful situations is greatly reduced, hence improving data quality and speed; reading is easy and tags are cheap. Imagine a typical commercial off-the-shelf mobile phone with an integrated RFID reader and open APIs to control it - no special hardware, broken devices easy to replace, good connectivity with WLAN and 3G, SDKs available to create great enterprise solutions, good battery life and fine selection of 3rd party applications.

Why this has to be a dream?