How To Tell If Your Phone Has Nfc

Your Android phone's NFC hardware is for more than just transferring content and using mobile payments. Y'all can buy cheap, programmable NFC tags and take your phone automatically perform actions when yous impact them.

For instance, yous could place NFC tags on your bedside tabular array, near your front door, in your car, and on your desk at work. Tapping your phone confronting them or placing information technology down on them could automatically select device settings that makes sense in that location.

What You'll Need

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You'll need just two things for this. First, you'll demand an Android phone with NFC hardware in it — and most Android phones will now offer that. Lower-cease Android phones may not include NFC hardware to keep costs low. You can perform a web search for your model of telephone and "NFC" or merely open its Settings screen. You'll find the NFC selection under more than Wireless & networks options. Manifestly, the NFC hardware must be enabled for everything else here to work.

Second, y'all'll need programmable NFC tags. Search for NFC tags on a site like Amazon.com and y'all'll notice them available for a fairly low price. Some manufacturers make their own, branded ones — but yous don't demand tags made past your Android telephone's manufacturer.

These tags don't have batteries in them, only they do have a scrap of memory. When you place your telephone's NFC reader near them, the NFC reader provides power to the tag, and can read the data from the tag. The tags are programmable, and then you tin can write any data you want into the tag from your phone.

Programming the Tags

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You'll at present demand an app that can program the tags. Android doesn't include i, but y'all can search for "nfc tags" on Google Play to discover a lot of apps that tin can handle this for you — including free ones. For example, the NFC Tools app volition let yous write data to a tag and read the data already on tags.

Install such an app, open it, and choose the information you'd like to write to a tag. You lot may be able to lock a tag and so information technology can't be reprogrammed, which may exist good if y'all're leaving that tag in a public surface area. Withal, that ways you will never be able to change the data on the tag in the future, so don't use this choice unless you have a good reason to.

Afterwards, you tin tap the tag against the NFC reader on the dorsum of your phone, and it'll copy that data to the tag'due south retention. Place the tag in a convenient location for the activeness you chose.

Using the Tags

Adjacent, y'all'll need an app that will reply to the tags. For instance, if you lot used NFC Tools to write data to your tags, you lot can install the NFC Tasks app. When your phone reads an NFC tag yous've written instructions to, the NFC Tools app will read the instructions from that NFC tag and perform them.

Yous can then just place the tags somewhere convenient. Identify them on a tabular array, and then identify your phone on them when you desire to perform the action. Spike them to a wall virtually a door if you want to tap your phone against a tag when you leave or enter an area. It'due south upwardly to y'all what you desire to use these tags for. The uses are practically endless.

For example, if you regularly need to fix an hour-long timer when you lot practise your laundry, you can program an NFC tag to showtime an hour-long timer and place it next to your laundry machine. Set up your phone downward on that tag or tap it and it'll beginning the laundry rimer. If you regularly pair your phone with a Bluetooth keyboard, you could affix an NFC tag to the back of the keyboard and tap your telephone against information technology to automatically go through the Bluetooth pairing procedure.

Or, you can set up up a tag with your Wi-Fi details, and guests can just tap their phones against the NFC tag to connect to your Wi-Fi network without locating it and entering a passcode. They would need an advisable app installed on their phone to do this, however.

Apple's iPhone six does have NFC hardware, merely apps can't apply information technology — it's currently just for Apple Pay. Future software updates might allow you to do more with it, simply yous can't correct now. Windows Phone does take some back up for this likewise, so iPhone users are the merely ones left out right now.

Paradigm Credit: Beau Giles on Flickr