14 DAY TRIAL // Handsets packing NFC (Near Field Communication) capabilities have started to become increasingly popular among users around the world, and sales reached 30 million last year alone.
According to a recent report from Berg Insight, sales of NFC-enabled smartphones are expected to enjoy a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 87.8 percent in the coming years, reaching 700 million units in 2016.
Last year, leading mobile phone makers around the world launched no less than 40 NFC-enabled handsets, helping the technology short-range wireless point-to-point communication reach a breakthrough.
“Even though it will take some time before the stakeholders agree on business models for payment networks, other use cases such as reading tags and easy pairing of devices may well be compelling enough for handset vendors to integrate NFC in mid- and high-end devices already today” concluded Mr Malm.
The NFC technology can enable a variety of applications at the moment, including device pairing for information exchange, contactless payments, electronic ticketing, or to establish Bluetooth or WLAN connections.
In addition to helping NFC grow, the increase in smartphone sales is also driving attach rates for various other connectivity technologies, including GPS, Bluetooth and WLAN.
High-end smartphones feature these capabilities as standard these days, the same as most mid and low-end devices. Moreover, feature phones are also expected to pack similar functionality.
“The attach rate for GPS among GSM/WCDMA/LTE handsets reached 31 percent in 2011 and grew to 38 percent for all air interface standards,” Berg Insight reports.
WLAN-enabled handsets have doubled annually in the past four years, while the attach rate increased to 33 percent in 2011.
Users can benefit from WLAN connectivity in handsets in a variety of ways, including offloading data traffic from mobile networks, indoor navigation, or media synchronization.
“Reliable indoor navigation systems for handsets need hybrid location technologies that fuse signal measurements from multiple satellite systems like GPS and GLONASS with cellular and WLAN network signals, together with data from sensors such as accelerometers, gyroscopes, compasses and altimeters”, said André Malm, senior analyst, Berg Insight.