Tag: near-field communications

Articles

Previous Coverage on HomeNetworking01.info

Sony’s Personal Content Station – a mobile Wi-Fi NAS that you touch on with your Android phone 

From the horse’s mouth

Sony

Latest press release from Sony at Mobile World Congress

Personal Content Station LLS-201

http://youtu.be/eAowGfUeqjY – Link to this video if you can’t see it on this site or want to “throw” it to your DLNA smart TV using Twonky or similar software

Portable Wireless Server WG-C10

http://youtu.be/-C1HAQj0YpQ – Link to this video if you can’t see it on this site or want to “throw” it to your DLNA smart TV using Twonky or similar software

My Comments

Previously, I commented on a news article about Sony releasing a NAS that allows you to upload pictures from your Android device just by touching the device to this NAS. Now, Sony have premiered this device along with another mobile NAS at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona this year.

But there are two devices rather than the one device. The former device that I touched on previously allows you to upload photos, videos and other content to its 1Tb hard disk using USB file transfer, NFC or SD memory cards so you can effectively “dump” your pictures and videos from your smartphone, camera or camcorder, thus making way for new material.

The Personal Content Station can play the images to a regular “brown-goods” flatscreen TV using an HDMI connector or you can make them available through your home network using the open-frame DLNA standards. I would also like to be sure that you can transfer the images between your PC and this device using standard network file-transfer protocols like CIFS or HTTP. Of course there is the ability to use an accompanying app to “throw” the images to a social network, blog or other Website using your smartphone or tablet.

As well, the Portable Wireless Server can share the content you have on a USB storage device or an SD card to its own wireless network so you can quickly share “just-taken” photos with your smartphone, tablet or Ultrabook. This is becoming important with devices like the Dell XPS 13 which doesn’t come with an SD card slot or the detachable-keyboard hybrids that have a standard SD card slot only on the keyboard module.

The Sony Portable Wireless Server also works as an “external battery pack” for the many battery-thirsty gadgets that are important to our mobile online life. This is so true if you are dealing with the smartphone that serves as your mobile Internet terminal or your Walkman.

At least Sony is fielding devices that work as a team to satisfy the reality that confronts us through our online content-creation lives.

Article

Toshiba Satellite U925T is First NFC-Enabled Ultrabook#xtor=RSS-181#xtor=RSS-181#xtor=RSS-181

My Comments

From this article, I reckon that Toshiba has used the Satellite U925T Ultrabook to push themselves ahead of the game by integrating the “touch-and-go” near-field-communications technology in to a portable computer.

One key advantage that I see of this is exploiting the mobile-wallet systems like MasterCard PayPASS and, perhaps, Google Wallet to allow NFC-compliant payment cards to facilitate an online transaction that doesn’t have the fraud risks associated with “card not present” transactions. This would be facilitated by the use of appropriate software that interlinks with the NFC reader and merchant-side software that runs the transaction as if you are paying for the goods at a store using your card and their card terminal.

Similarly, the Android and Windows Phone ecosystem would benefit from this feature through access to the mobile wallets that can be hosted in the NFC-capable smartphones. This can extend to device-to-device file-transfer functions like Android Beam where users could upload pictures and sync contacts and QR-discovered Websites to the notebook from the smartphone.

In addition, the setup routines associated with commissioning Bluetooth or Wi-Fi wireless devices with this notebook can be simplified to a “touch-and-go” procedure if these devices support this functionality. This can then lead to the ability to transfer “extended-functionality” files to the host computer so as to open up advanced feature sets like sound-optimisation functions for headsets and microphones.

What I see about this more is that this Toshiba Windows 8 hybrid Ultrabook is an example of using NFC to demonstrate a synergy between open-platform computing devices. This then simply leads to a breeding ground for innovation.